Recording of an album for guitar and electronics

Project Blog | Project Updates | Jason Noble | December 15, 2021

Recording of an album for guitar and electronics

Composer Jason Noble and guitarist Steven Cowan recorded three original pieces for guitar and electronics in McGill University’s Multi-Media Room (MMR) during a session last November. The pieces incorporate recordings of speech captured in interviews with residents of their home province of Newfoundland, Canada, as part of a larger project researching dialectal variation as a source for musical creation. The recordings will be released on an album next year, funded by an ACTOR Research-Creation grant. The final piece on this album, to be composed early next year, will feature an empirically validated system of analogies between guitar timbres and spoken vowels, drawing on the acoustical research of Caroline Traube as well as a forthcoming perceptual experiment. The pieces also draw on narrative elements from the interviews, with themes including folklore (especially ghost and fairy stories that are popular in Newfoundland), the battle of Beaumont Hamel, technological change, and the role of dialects in establishing regional identities. 3D audio recording and spatialization by audio engineer Carolina Rodriguez Escobar and recording assistant Ying Ying Zhang.