Rick Snow's composition

Rick Snow is one of the composers/inventors I wrote about in this week's story about the Pure Data computer programming language and it's creative real-world uses.

He sent me a piece he composed called "Labyrinth," which was originally recorded for eight-channel surround-sound playback but has been encoded to create a virtual surround-sound experience for those of you using headphones.

"It was the first serious, long-term project I undertook using [Pure Data]," Snow said.

Push play to give it a listen.

Here's how Snow describes Labyrinth in detail (be sure to put on your thinking cap and keep in mind that he's a Ph.D. candidate and researcher at UCSD):

My composition "Labyrinth" (aka "Labyrinth of Iteration and Shadow, Blending and Cutting Away," aka "Clockwork Calligraphy") resulted from an intuitive blend of metaphor and process. In terms of metaphor I took inspiration from the graphic arts and the sounds of clockwork.

For me the delicate smudging and shading employed when using charcoal and the crosshatching and elegant calligraphy common among work made with pen and ink offer near limitless inspiration.  Likewise the malleable qualities of a texture made from a hyper clockwork of tuned clicks shifting speeds and layered into surreal densities and trajectories offer similar possibilities.

In terms of process, I spent a great deal of time refining a means of control over a texture of eight voices.  Each voice was a doubly enveloped and spatialized iterative stream of subtractive synthesis (and its shadow in reverberation). These materials were then layered or set against one another with consistently shifting relationships.

While composing the form of the piece, it struck me that these materials do push and pull the listener into unique musical places while maintaining a high degree of self similarity. I feel there is also a stress that pervades the experience of listening to the piece, though it is a stress that subsides a bit towards the end- a feeling similar to that of slowly becoming more familiar with an unfamiliar place but without ever managing an escape.