In my search for reducing material, I came to consider the repetition of a four-note chord, the tetrachord D-E-F-G, as relevant. Childishly simple, since it consists of four consecutive white keys on the piano, this sound object might seem a priori of little interest: a child playing on a piano would produce more diversity. However, when listening to it on the accordion, modulated by differences in intensity, the alternating play between the left and right keyboards of the accordion, and the inflections of intensity, the color of this chord became very particular, losing its quality as a chord and leading us purely into the listening of sound. Associated with the piano, a new hybrid instrument with an imprecise construction appears, creating a texture, a soundscape, similar to those usually produced by synthesizers.

 

The repetition of this chord was then to be modulated, and I wanted to create the sensation of an ever-changing duration, a sort of uneven, limping 2 beat, inspired in idea by what can be found in certain Eastern music. Then the sound continuum of this duet would be broken only by the rules I was adopting at the time: silence, accent, change of register. The principle would therefore be simple: repeat this chord in this irregular swing and vary it only by octaviation, change of nuance or silence. But after composing the first minute by feeling, it seemed to me that what I was listening to bore the trace of something else, the trace of a phenomenon far removed from the conceptual ideas that had brought it about.

 

It was while lying in the dim light of my room in Rome, on my bed, and looking out the window, that the question became clearer. Through the gap between the slightly open left shutter of my window and the wall, the light from outside shone through, creating a vertical white and luminous line. This line was often interrupted by a multitude of black dots or spots, swaying and sometimes making the line disappear, creating figures and patterns that seemed to repeat and follow a precise structure. This particular "animation" piqued my curiosity. The black sweeping motion from the top to the bottom of this luminous line was the only thing I could observe, yet it seemed to me that its invisible cause had no aesthetic relation to what I was seeing. Indeed, the leaves of the bougainvillea plant outside, swaying with the wind, cast shadows between the sun and the gap left between the shutters and the wall. This swaying thus created the rhythm and the black-light-black structures that I observed.

 

By understanding the cause, this animation took on another dimension. It was the trace of something else, the visible phenomenon of an invisible action, perhaps impossible to know. And faced with the impossibility of truly representing the cause of this phenomenon, its observation nonetheless provided access to a particular sensation, that of a partial representation. The sensation that what we see, what is presented to our senses, is not reality, but only a trace of that reality, and that therefore access to reality occurs only through a mediation between an observed phenomenon and the mental representation of its cause.

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The parallel between this observation and the listening of the first minute that I wrote led me to explore how to evoke the previously described sensation in musical listening. Here, the question was to find the underlying cause of the rhythmic variations in my repetitions.

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Many ways presented themselves: ping pong, tennis, pendulums, bounces. But it was in the collision of two blocks in a closed, frictionless space that I found a model I could exploit. After using a simulator on the MyPhysicsLab website and following a few discussions with its creator, Erik Neumann, I extracted a series of values corresponding to the duration between impacts. From this series came the durations separating each chord in the first seven minutes of the piece.

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Of course, knowing or recognizing the model is of little interest to a listener, and the challenge lies not there, but in the sensation that what we perceive is not what it seems. In the same way that the heard object (the chord) is not understood for what it might be (its harmony for example), time and durations are the imprint of something else, of a hidden action. 

 

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