Invocation

Posted 2 May 2009, 22:53

Description

Quranic recitation and Tibetan Buddhist chant, combined and time-stretched with spectral processing.

Duration: 8:16

Background & Technical Details

This piece is made from two source recordings:

Both were subjected to time-stretching. The Fatiha recording was stretched, rather drastically, from its original length of 1:14 to 8:16. The Kabsumpa recording was originally 5:38 and was stretched to match the 8:16 length. The only other processing was to use a technique called spectral smoothing, which has the effect of “smearing” the sound. Both tracks are at their original pitch, and were not processed in any other way — no filtering, no added reverb — other than to raise the amplitude of the Tibetan chant so that the levels of the tracks would better match. Neither track was edited in any way, except to remove a small amount of silence at the end of the Quranic recitation.

The bird song is part of the Kabsumpa recording.

For fellow Csound geeks, I used the PVS (phase vocoder) opcodes to do the time-stretching and spectral smoothing.

I am not making the source files available for download, as I don’t have the rights, but my Csound code is downloadable as usual for those who are interested.

The piece is dedicated to Alan Morse Davies, whose gorgeous music (particularly Y Bardd Glas Geraint and The Last Summer) has been a source of inspiration.

Files/Downloads

MP3 (19MB, 320kpbs, 44.1K/16)
FLAC (37MB, 618kpbs, 44.1K/16)
Csound files (1.5KB)

Copyright 2009 by Dave Seidel, some rights reserved.
Creative Commons License
Invocation by Dave Seidel is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

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