Imprints in time

for alto saxophone, thunder tube, and computer

ABOUT

Imprints in Time for alto saxophone, thunder tube, and computer was written for and is dedicated to a consortium of saxophonists consisting of Noa Even, Drew 
Whiting, Zach Shemon, Henning Schröder, and Justin Massey. The work abstractly reflects on how people are connected through their interactions.

The title comes from an article by Michael Tze-Sung Longnecker that posits that we can think of objects as creating a curve in time, just as objects curve space, and he refers to these curves as imprints in time. I imagined personal interactions as having an analogous mass-energy to objects and that interactions imprint on our personal histories similar to how objects bend space and possibly time. The audio consists of three, interactive sonic layers – the saxophone, live processing of the saxophone, and fixed media files. The visuals for the work are generated in real time: the energy in the low, mid, and high frequency regions of the three audio layers is extracted and mapped to control the parameters of visual events.