SHUTTER [2020]

At the end of 2020 I worked on a developmental showing of Helen O’Leary’s one-woman play ‘Shutter’, which deals with concepts of time, the fallacy of memory and recollection. I was asked to create a soundworld that would complement and support these themes. Two showings took place on 11^th and 12^th December 2020 and I worked alongside sound artist Mauricio Iregui who contributed separate aspects of sound design for the showing.

This project gave me the opportunity to explore themes of compositional transformation through two separate pieces of redundant sampling/delay/pitch shifting hardware. Firstly a BOSS RSD-10 and an RPS-10, which are part of the Boss microrack series from the 1980’s. The result was 14 separate soundworlds, created solely using both pieces of hardware, modified cassette player (variable speed) and an external synthesiser called a Benjolin. Below are several excerpts of what was included in the showing.

LIGHTLY ROW

Lightly Rows is a transformation of the popular nursery rhyme. It uses the pitch shifting abilities of the BOSS RPS-10 in conjunction with a Benjolin Synth to create rich pitch shifting possibilities. The hold function, which freezes and loops audio, is also used.

GROUNDSMAN

Groundsman – this particular example takes garden chimes and uses the BOSS RPS-10 to pitch shift. The output of the RPS-10 is fed into the pitch input, the feedback loop creative expressive pitch shifting possibilities.

SONGSTREAM 1

Song Stream 1 (Little things mean a lot) – In Shutter, the song ‘Little things mean a lot’ is a common theme. I experimented with using the BOSS RSD-10 in a similar fashion to the above audio example by patching its output into its pitch input. The RSD-10 was also part of an adjustable feedback loop via an FX send; it’s output would also send to its input through a mixer channel.