Towards an Analysis
of Trevor Wishart’s Imago: Form, Structure
and TechnologyImago is an electroacoustic work written in 2002 by Trevor
Wishart, one of Britain’s leading composers in this field. Typically, Wishart
realized the work using software he himself produced. The software package Sound Loom provides a
suite of processing algorithms that can be applied to recorded sound
files. All the sounds in Imago derive from the transformation of
one brief recording. A wide variety of material results from the processing,
ranging from short events lasting less than one second to long sustained
textures. Often the sounds are the result of many stages of processing applied
in sequence. The work itself is formed
by the juxtaposition and superposition of the many sound files resulting from
such processing. Usefully, both for the
composer and the analyst, the software enables users to keep a record of the
sounds and processes used so it is possible to trace the creative development
of the work and relate this to the final composition. This
paper describes the approach taken to analyzing Imago. It is an approach that combines top-down analysis,
interrogating the finished work, with ground up analysis – study of the
creative process and tracking the development of the musical materials toward
the completed piece. Only through this dual approach can a rounded account of
such works can be produced. Since the
work is a ‘fixed media’ piece, existing only as a sound recording (there is a
descriptive score by the composer for sound diffusion purposes, but this is
only in summary form), our analysis has largely been conducted within the sound
domain. Innovative analytical software we have devised to assist with this will
be presented. This
work is part of TaCEM, a 30-month project funded by the UK’s Arts and
Humanities Research Council. | 