Home
Hello, and welcome to my home on the Internet. I am a composer of Electroacoustic and Acousmatic Sound Art, living in the Burren region of Co. Clare, Ireland. My primary instrument is the synthesiser, i.e. ‘tactile, Hardware’, and ‘Software’ sound synthesis systems. Now, having said this, I am not averse to manipulating Field Recordings, Audio Samples, and general digital data (Graphics, Protein Sequences, etc.) for sound creation purposes.
Following closely on is the Computer. I use Windows, Apple Mac and Linux PCs to aid me in shaping my synthesis, sound file manipulations and audio contortions into finished pieces. I compose primarily for fixed media (digital files for rendering through speakers, installations and CD) and I use both standard and more experimental approaches to my compositional works. With the aid of computers, my musical creations are realised entirely in the digital realm. This, in turn, presents me with the opportunity to call upon an entirely new sonic palette, allowing for manipulation in both the spectral and temporal domains of the sound.
Audio programming languages like Csound and Supercollider offer a near infinite number of possibilities for the synthesis and manipulation of sound. Applications like Composers’ Desktop Project allow for limitless processing of the sound. Tools like the visual programming language Max/MSP/Jitter and the object-oriented programming of Supercollider, coupled with the Processing language for multimedia design and the Open Source Lightworks video NLE (Non-Linear Editing) system, allow me to pursue a high degree of interactivity and graphics processing in my installations.
I derive and get a lot of the source material and ideas for my compositions from the attributes, parameters and idiosyncrasies of the Natural World. I have used my own MRI brain scans as the source material for a simple additive synthesiser (oscillators) for the Sonification of the images. I built MIDI sequences using the protein sequence of ‘alpha-Carotene’. And then there is the Seismic recording of the North Clare Earthquake of the 6th of May 2010, the loudest recording of any Seismic event on the island of Ireland, which I used to create the sound collage used in the ‘Scapes’ multimedia installation. I am continuously searching and looking for sources.
Finbarr Dillon Music 