Latin American Electroacoustic Music Collection

Celso Aguiar, Piece of Mind, 1995
(Brazil)



Recording time: 7 min 44 s.

Other resources available:
- About Celso Aguiar
- Compositions by Celso Aguiar

About this composition:

Piece of Mind
Celso Aguiar
1995

The title of the piece is a word play on two homophonous words in the English language ("piece" and "peace") and stands as a reaction to the different ways we face fun and pleasure. Exploring the concept "Fun is dangerous" (which Aguiar was told once in the USA), Piece of Mind is about the violence of fun or the fun of violence, at a more extreme level than is normally encountered in everyday life.

The piece can also be seen to operate as a continuum between two sound processing techniques in a blend of musique concrète and powerful spectral modelling synthesis. Julius Smith predicted that time domain techniques (such as sampling and granular synthesis) will be absorbed into frequency domain techniques (such as spectral modelling). This idea has evolved using particular but complementary resources from each technique to benefit the musical discourse.

In 1994, Aguiar worked with Xavier Serra at CCRMA to recreate an IFFT algorithm for additive synthesis. Some of the instruments used in the piece were created in this way. The piece was composed using the Lisp tools CLM and Common Music on the NeXT computer at CCRMA, Stanford University.

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