VITA ► WORKS ► C. CHAMBER MUSIC . . ► Kindermund


Kindermund (Child Mouth)
electro-acoustic audio play

Kindermund is a journey into the lingual world of Leo (then 20 months old).
During this time of beginning language acquisition we humans accomplish the seemingly natural yet amazing work of linking the world within and around us with auditory events we hear and imitate.

Besides many other aspects this process of finding speech and language has a musical dimension as well. Pleasurably playing with the sounds of your own voice in ever developing variations towards an increasingly differentiated expression is actually nothing else but learning an instrument.

Consequently a lingual-audio-play project might follow the development of one voice during a whole lifetime, there was not enough time for that in this case. 😉

Instead I directed the aural attention towards the events of repetition, variation and playing with small and tiniest particles of speech. These processes accompany and counterpoint passages with original recordings of the singing and playing child.

Along the path various associations are called up: choirs, electronic music such as K. H. Stockhausen's Gesang der Jünglinge im Feuerofen, the firing of the synapses, instrumental sounds . . .

Formally the piece is organized in 3 sections, their durations are related by the Fibonacci numbers 144, 377 and 233; the proportions of the Golden Ratio serve to convey a feeling for a naturally balanced evolution on the „outer” form level as well as in the finer, more inward structures.

In the first section we hear Leo's favorite song of that time: the „Bi-Ba-Butzemann”. Songs like this with their earworm potential are real milestones for the lingual development! Leo never got tired of singing the song again and again, and often he accompanied himself on a log-drum.
My compositional work in this case was to deconstruct and re-synthesize his chant into a sort of background-choir.

After the song-prelude we are witness to another way how little children delightfully connect their synapses: by reading picture books. Here it's the story of the big fish and the little fish, leafed through, read and commented again and again with great perseverance. (I prefer the word read, because little children do read the pictures even if they are not yet able to read written text.)
While the accompaniment and composition in the first section still had the character of a speaking choir, it now becomes more and more musicalized and differentiated in pitch and rhythm.

In section 3 the development goes even further: Leo's voice, which was audible as „original” (= coming from the microphone), is now turned into musical sound, modulated and part of the musical syntax. The „speech sound serenade” consists of 26 small sections (thinking of the 26 letters of the alphabet), as it goes on, little melody arcs are built from formant sounds.

Following the imagination that this world of sound is all around us and within, I have produced the piece in 5.1 Dolby Digital. All material – with the exception of a few log-drum sounds – is gained from Leo's voice.

The composition and realization of granular synthesis and sound-warpings were done with Csound; post production happened on a Nuendo workstation. I recorded with a Neumann KM 184 to a Tascam DAT recorder, some few takes were done with a cheap microphone to an MD recorder.


▲