Gordon Monro - "Dry Rivers"

"Mandala 1086"

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"Dry Choices"

"Dry Rivers"

Tape piece, duration 12 mins 0 secs (1995)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Australia Licence.

Go to the download page for an extract from Dry Rivers.

Program note

Dry Rivers was inspired by a trip the composer took through the Western part of New South Wales, Australia. The country is semi-arid rather than desert, being covered by low scrub. It is very flat, and changes imperceptibly over hundreds of kilometres. Every river we came to, except one (the Darling), was dry.

The piece uses digital synthesis; specifically, fractal waveforms*. There are nine parallel lines of sound, each with a different sub-audio frequency (the slowest repeating every 6 seconds). However the waveforms are sufficiently complex to allow each cycle to be heard as a distinct sound. The timbres of the waveforms change slowly throughout the piece.

The nine lines consist of "phrases" arranged in a simple fractal-like manner. The dual use of fractals at the waveform level and at the phrasal level helps to give the impression of something that is always the same, yet always changing.

Dry Rivers was realised on a workstation belonging to the School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Sydney. The piece was subsequently used as the soundtrack to the abstract video Rainbow Snake Dry River.

* Gordon Monro. "Fractal interpolation waveforms", Computer Music Journal vol. 19, no. 1, Spring 1995, pp. 88-98.

Performances, etc

"Cyber Dreaming" concert, Old Darlington School, University of Sydney, 27 April 1995;
Australian Computer Music Association conference, Melba Hall, University of Melbourne, 9 June 1995 (Melbourne);
17th Asian Composers' League Festival, Bangkok, 5 December 1995;
Third International Conference on Religion, Literature and the Arts, Sancta Sophia College, University of Sydney, 20 January 1996;
Awarded an honourable mention in the 1996 Prix Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria;
Selected for the Listening Room in the 1996 International Computer Music Conference, Hong Kong, August 1996;
Used as a contribution to ex static, two sound events in Melbourne curated by Terry McDermott, October and November 1996;
Played on Spanish radio, December 2002 (I have no further details of this).

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