From Technological Investigation and Software Emulation to Music Analysis: An integrated approach to Barry Truax's Riverrun

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to studying Barry Truax’s Riverrun as it is being carried out within the TaCEM project (Technology and Creativity in Electroacoustic Music), a collaboration between the Universities of Huddersfield and Durham funded for 30 months (2012-2015) by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the United Kingdom. This approach aims at realising an Interactive Aural Analysis with which the user can explore the creative and technological environment used by the composer to build his oeuvre, as well as navigate aurally through the results of the musicological study. It involves an important technological investigation of Truax’s GSX program for digital granular synthesis, leading to the implementation, in the Max environment, of emulation software allowing for the live recreation of each of Riverrun’s sequences, along with further tools dedicated to the musical analysis of the piece. This paper presents the technological investigation and its issues, the pieces of software for the Interactive Aural Analysis of the work, and musicological observations drawn from such an approach.