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Why are we here?

from Gemini Retrograde by Kevin J. O'Conner

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Recorded and edited 21–24 May and 2 June 2022.

This is an unusual piece, as it was inspired by the speech Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut gave on the Senate floor on 24 May 2022, shortly after the school shooting in Uvalde, TX.

It was a powerful speech. Not just because the Sandy Hook school shooting happened in his state, but also because he asked the questions that a lot of people have been asking for many years now:

"What are we doing?"

"Why are we here?"

Additionally, he addressed the Republicans in the Senate (though I suspect almost none of them were in attendance at that moment) directly:

“Why do you spend all this time running for the United States Senate — why do you go through all the hassle of getting this job, of putting yourself in a position of authority — if your answer is that as this slaughter increases, as our kids run for their lives, we do nothing?”

And:

"Why are you here if not to solve a problem as existential as this?"

I imagined that he would have sounded like Charlie Brown's teacher, Miss Othmar, to the Republicans listening.

So, I made a screen recording of the speech and set about mucking around with the audio. I didn't get Miss Othmar (I probably should have used ring modulation), but something perhaps more evocative: bursts of distortion, occasionally resembling stylized gunfire and spent rounds dropping to the ground, following the cadences of Murphy's speech.

Intriguing—but not quite enough. At that point, it was just something I'd done with a recording, not something I'd made myself.

Next I added in sections from a working file and a semi-finished piece that wasn't really amounting to anything. After some trial and error, I found a good balance between the manipulated audio I'd started with and my own original sounds, which were already closer to the noise end of the spectrum.

The last part of the process was to add in some actual excerpts from the speech. However, I didn't want to do it in a way that would be exploitative—for that I could have just posted a YouTube clip of the speech on my blog and been done with it.

So I went back to my screen capture and compiled the iterations of "what are we doing" and "why are we here". A slice of that audio at around 2~4 kHz is mixed in—not particularly audible, but more subliminal. A backwards snippet appears at the very end.

The most obvious bit is in the middle—pitch shifted, stretched out, and processed to the point where it doesn't resemble speech at all. It becomes an interruption of the cacophony that comes before and after, a moment to slow down and ponder what's going on.

credits

from Gemini Retrograde, released June 11, 2022
Instrumentation:
Soma Lyra-8 (x2)
Soma QO
Soma Ether
Hologram Microcosm
Soma Cosmos

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Tinty Music Bremerton, Washington

Fabricating sounds since 1987. Unafraid to rush headlong into obscurity for the sake of art and making sense out of the world. Folds, spindles, and mutilates as needed. Brickwalling not allowed.

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