Alice

Alice was composed using the experimental film Urbandale by Corey Arcangel (2001) as a visual basis.

The piece takes influence from Oval’s Sytemisch album and uses a scratched CD playing the song Alice by Howie Beck as source material, along with three short audio recordings. I also used granular and analogue synthesis.

The film is treated as an animated graphic score, mapping unpitched sound to black and pitched sustained sound to red, then swapping these rules over at 2:48. I allowed the prominence of each sound to be determined by the vertical axis and let the horizontal axis determine panning. I occasionally wanted to let the image echo the music and vice versa for a more creative interpretation.