Conference Schedule / Archive

The name "Hrafntinnusker" ("Raven-stone-scissor") refers to a volcanically active region, more precisely, a mountain in Iceland. The elevation Hrafntinnusker is exceptionally rich in obsidian, a kind of glassy solidified lava. On the way to that area, the Laugavegur leads through an area in which the local mountains seemed to be able to perform the technique of grannular synthesis perfectly: grained rhyolite rock is superimposed in light and dark distribution patterns by apparently stochastic laws to create in regard to an artistic point of view an extraordinarily sophisticated designed landscape.
The structure, formation processes, but also the material and the mood of this landscape have created the starting point of the piece "Hrafntinnusker". Grannular generated structures are distributed on tilted planes in space and are in a continuous transformation process. The sounds used vaguely reminiscent of hard materials such as stone, glass and metal.
This piece was composed entirely in Csound and blue, using Cmask as an external sound object within blue. The composition consists of these external sound objects, each of them producing a cloud of sound grains according to stochastic distributions. Also the information of the location of the sound is thus generated stochastically. Some parameters weregenerated using blue's capabilities of automatisation. Then the whole information was fed into my Csound code for spatialisation. The result then is the 3rd order Ambisonic encoded piece, which may be decoded in a versatile way to several possible layouts of speakers.