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The Prix Ars Electronica Archive is a collection enabling search and viewing of all the submissions since 1987. The award-winning projects are documented with catalogue texts and audio-visual media. All other submissions can be searched by title/artist and displayed with year, category in list form. Please cite the credits (artwork name, artist and photographer) and only use the materials if your article is related to Ars Electronica.
Parcours de l'Entité
Flo Menezes
Flo Menezes' "Parcours de l'Entité" is a lively blend of electro-acoustic sounds - reproduced from a recording - and instrumental live music of flutes and percussion instruments.
"Parcours de l'Entité" is based on harmonic techniques which I have been working on since about 1984: one is the cyclical module, another is proportional projections. The aim of these methods was the development and emergence of harmonic structures derived from complex harmonic figures (entities) with reference to the tempered system (module), as well as to non-tempered sound spaces (projections). In the case of the non- tempered harmonies, a computer program was developed for the Atari computer to calculate the projections.
Although one notices at the beginning of the piece a spectral mixture of the sounds of the flutes and the sounds of the percussion instruments, as this is determined by the sound material of the original tape, gradually a real discord may be heard as it develops between the two sound spheres, finally merging into a melodic structure of the flute in C. This is developed from the middle of the composition to the end of the piece. In this process one can hear a more and more lively layer in the sound material that basically consists of sounds that have been developed through the use of the synthesizer computer program Music V. One could say that the Music V sounds come to replace the percussion instruments after this point, since the computer generated sounds are derived from the "inharmonic" structure of gong tones. The entire composition is nonetheless based on a single symmetrical harmonic figure. It is as though this latent structure were making its own path (its "Parcours") into the constitution of the piece. With the exception of the Music V sounds, all of the sound material was developed from a digital recording of the electroacoustic processing of the sounds of flutes and metal percussion instruments.
"Parcours de l'Entité" is based on harmonic techniques which I have been working on since about 1984: one is the cyclical module, another is proportional projections. The aim of these methods was the development and emergence of harmonic structures derived from complex harmonic figures (entities) with reference to the tempered system (module), as well as to non-tempered sound spaces (projections). In the case of the non- tempered harmonies, a computer program was developed for the Atari computer to calculate the projections.
Although one notices at the beginning of the piece a spectral mixture of the sounds of the flutes and the sounds of the percussion instruments, as this is determined by the sound material of the original tape, gradually a real discord may be heard as it develops between the two sound spheres, finally merging into a melodic structure of the flute in C. This is developed from the middle of the composition to the end of the piece. In this process one can hear a more and more lively layer in the sound material that basically consists of sounds that have been developed through the use of the synthesizer computer program Music V. One could say that the Music V sounds come to replace the percussion instruments after this point, since the computer generated sounds are derived from the "inharmonic" structure of gong tones. The entire composition is nonetheless based on a single symmetrical harmonic figure. It is as though this latent structure were making its own path (its "Parcours") into the constitution of the piece. With the exception of the Music V sounds, all of the sound material was developed from a digital recording of the electroacoustic processing of the sounds of flutes and metal percussion instruments.
Flo Menezes (BR), born 1962, studied at the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale (CSC) in Padova, Italy (1991), in France with Pierre Boulez (1988) and in Austria with Luciano Berio (1989).Professor of Electroacoustic Music and Composition at the State University of São Paulo.In 1994, he founded the Studio PANaroma de Música Electroacústica da UNESP/FASM. In 1995 Menezes also created the International Electroacoustic Music Competition of São Paulo.