Djinn

Djinn was created as the result of attempting to compose a piece guided by a set of a self imposed limitations. These rules do not have the same function as the serialistic rules employed by Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Eimert and Goyevarts. In fact these rules do not seek to address the structural nature of the piece whatsoever. They were merely created to counter the paradox of choice that I have mentioned previous chapters. By the time I got to the stage of writing this piece I had accumulated quite an large range of tools and techniques with which I could generate material so these rules were simply put in place to restrict the amount of these tools that I could employ. I also chose my source material from the two objects nearest to me at the time of inception, a plastic wrapper and a harmonica. Another reason from composing Djinn was to step away from the corporeally driven composition that I had been working with at the time. 

While I sometimes find working within a DAW can sometimes be restricting in terms of the transformative processes afforded to the composer (as opposed to the seemingly inexhaustible processes available within audio programming environments such as Csound or Supercollider), I do find the workflow to be a lot more efficient when processing and arranging audio on the fly. As a result of this strategy, much of the material used within this piece was generated in a relatively short time period. I mapped the LEAP motion sensor to several parameters of the audio units within the signal chain and performed musical gestures on the fly. This was achieved through the use of Processing for the initial collection of Cartesian data from the sensor and a Max For Live OSC receiver.

Composed in 2018.