DURATION: 8 minutes 5 seconds

“Pareidolia” refers to the tendency for humans to find familiar elements and patterns within a seemingly random or abstract texture, such as finding faces in the clouds or voices from within the noise of an air conditioner. This fixed-media piece aims to capture this phenomenon exclusively using sounds which were originally recorded on a French horn, before being transformed into an abstract soundscape which nonetheless contains organic and recognizable elements for the listener to identify.

I composed this piece entirely from processed samples, without any synthesized sounds. All samples were taken from recordings of various unpitched noises from a single French horn. Some of these sounds include wind noises, the tapping, scraping, and rolling of the bell of the instrument, and manipulating the tuning slides and valve caps in various ways. I then used a variety of spectral processing techniques to manipulate these dry, mechanical sounds, as well as using a combination of manual sampling and granular sampling to create denser textures. The piece is based around two main sonic environments: the first is characterized by a series of attack-decay gestures which are then reversed, over an increasingly dense background texture. The second area is sparser, and features sounds which are tied together with a causal relationship in a wide stereo space. These two environments are then merged and developed until the climax of the piece, before winding down for several minutes with long, descending figures and decelerating rhythmic gestures.