Inside These Waters from Water, Calling

Anne Hege

Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression

Abstract

Inside These Waters, music by Anne Hege, text by Camden Richards, is an excerpt from the fifty-minute soundtrack for the artist book Water, Calling created by Camden Richards and Deborah Sibony. Water, Calling is a collaborative artist book that explores the cyclical and omnipresent relationship of water and the self, inviting the reader to reflect upon water as more than a commodity, but rather as life-giving: spirit, flesh, and soul. Using my analog, live-looping instrument, The Tape Machine, and my daily practice improvising on this instrument as a starting place, I recorded improvisations on the instrument and used this as the base tracks for this piece. The Tape Machine is a handbuilt instrument created from two altered cassette players and one altered cassette recorder. The recorder stands in the middle with one player on the left and one on the right. A unique tape loop, created for each playing, is strung between the cassette devices. There are no effects added except what the machine creates. I sing in real-time into the recorder and manage playback from each player, adjusting the volume for discrete speakers hard-panned right and left. The machine highlights the degradation of sound present in the recording, allowing for a clear understanding of what vocals are live and what are echoed through the machine. With live manipulations of the tape, I am able to imitate the pitch-bending effects of water. With this, the Tape Machine emulates the distortions present in the watery world. For Inside these Waters, I layered tape machine samples with field recordings of water, and synthesis samples, while using various effects and filtering to connect the listener to the unique properties of water.

Citation

Anne Hege. 2022. Inside These Waters from Water, Calling. Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. DOI: 10.21428/92fbeb44.9552e483 [PDF]

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{nime2022_music_3,
 abstract = {Inside These Waters, music by Anne Hege, text by Camden Richards, is an excerpt from the fifty-minute soundtrack for the artist book Water, Calling created by Camden Richards and Deborah Sibony. Water, Calling is a collaborative artist book that explores the cyclical and omnipresent relationship of water and the self, inviting the reader to reflect upon water as more than a commodity, but rather as life-giving: spirit, flesh, and soul. Using my analog, live-looping instrument, The Tape Machine, and my daily practice improvising on this instrument as a starting place, I recorded improvisations on the instrument and used this as the base tracks for this piece. The Tape Machine is a handbuilt instrument created from two altered cassette players and one altered cassette recorder. The recorder stands in the middle with one player on the left and one on the right. A unique tape loop, created for each playing, is strung between the cassette devices. There are no effects added except what the machine creates. I sing in real-time into the recorder and manage playback from each player, adjusting the volume for discrete speakers hard-panned right and left. The machine highlights the degradation of sound present in the recording, allowing for a clear understanding of what vocals are live and what are echoed through the machine. With live manipulations of the tape, I am able to imitate the pitch-bending effects of water. With this, the Tape Machine emulates the distortions present in the watery world. For Inside these Waters, I layered tape machine samples with field recordings of water, and synthesis samples, while using various effects and filtering to connect the listener to the unique properties of water.},
 address = {Auckland, New Zealand},
 articleno = {3},
 author = {Anne Hege},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression},
 doi = {10.21428/92fbeb44.9552e483},
 editor = {Raul Masu},
 issn = {2220-4806},
 month = {jun},
 title = {Inside These Waters from Water, Calling},
 track = {Music},
 url = {https://doi.org/10.21428/92fbeb44.9552e483},
 year = {2022}
}