THE ELEVATOR PITCH....
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“SATSYMPH is a complex virtual sound-environment overlaid over the real world which the user negotiates with a GPS-enabled mobile device such as an iPhone”....
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THE PEOPLE....
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SATSYMPH is a 3-way collaboration between south-west-based composer and artist Marc Yeats , poet Ralph Hoyte, and musician and coder Phill Phelps.
Phill Phelps, Marc Yeats, Ralph Hoyte
THE LOWDOWN
SATSYMPH is a complex, multi-facetted project. Let’s explain it in steps:
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1. Firstly, contemporary poetry & contemporary music are composed for a very dense, multi-responsive and heavily authored environment. We, the composers, cannot determine HOW this environment is going to be negotiated by the user. This means that the music & words MUST be compelling ‘in any direction’ (= ‘as heard in any way at all’).
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2. We record the music & words (highly professional musicians from the Bristol Ensemble play all the parts live & professional voice artists will be used)
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3. In a very work-intensive process, the recordings are digitally processed, stacked, layered, modulated, stretched, morphed – you name it, we do it (and get very little sleep the while…)
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4. A whole series of ‘modules’ result from this process – modules of music, of words, of words-as-music, of music-as-words, of wordusic, of muwords (we’ll make up this new language as we go along)
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5. The aforesaid ‘modules’ are used to populate ‘a virtual auditorium’. This means we use software which allows us to place a virtual layer over a real landscape. This is another form of composition – composing with landscape. SATSYMPH composes with music, words and landscape.
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6. Once ‘the virtual auditorium’ is populated and very intensively tested (even less sleep), users will be able to go online and download SATSYMPH onto their iPhone as an Apple app.
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7. You go along to any space big enough to use ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD - oh, maybe a couple of hundred meters each way, such as your local park, or the Altiplano in Bolivia (well…) - click on the app – and SATSYMPH unrolls the aforesaid ‘virtual auditorium’ over your chosen space
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8. Stick your headphones on, watch out for rampant llamas or big red buses, and wander, or roll in your wheelchair, or toddle, or stroll, skip, crawl, sidle…
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9. What you hear depends on where you are! Repeat: what you hear depends on where you are! This is a highly complex, densely populated GPS-triggered environment. There’s masses going on. You’ll very quickly start to think about ‘music’ and ‘poetry’ in an entirely different way: “Hey, look, over there under those trees, there’s a huge swell of processed Alpenhorns mixed with gremlin-like poetic mutterings, they reach a crescendo at that mound, then drop into a deep well of almost heart-breakingly intimate water-maiden-speak…” “Did you get those blobby bits of staccato next to the playground?” “I reached a cusp and then it dropped me off into infinity”. It’s an almost synaesthetic experience: words and music are placed, they become tactile objects you manipulate by your movements. SATSYMPH composes with music, words and landscape. The interface is LANDSCAPE – how do you negotiate this new interface?
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10. Enough? More: this experience is individual, or shared with a few friends. SATSYMPH proposes to make the individual communal. Your iPhone will, if you want it to, track your unique route through SATSYMPH. You can then upload samples of ‘my own symphony’ to the SATSYMPH website for others to hear and comment on. You can join user groups and user forums to discuss and partake of the technology. And in 2011 you will be able to take part in a series of concert seminars to be held in Bristol, Belfast and Poole, Dorset. Here, users’ individual experiences (their journeys through SATSYMPH) will have been logged through time-stamped GPS co-ordinates recorded and uploaded to our SATSYMPH website earlier. A musical score will be created using this data to initiate and control music and voice material as experienced in SATSYMPH. Using live musicians and voice artists from the Bristol Ensemble along with pre-recorded music and words from the SATSYMPH regions, we will use these newly created scores to recreate user’s individual journeys through SATSYMPH giving an impression of what the SATSYMPH experience sounds like and share this with an audience along with presentations and discussions of the technology and work made.
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11. That’s about it. No, it isn’t. SATSYMPH is not just a one-off. Neither is it just confined to the UK. SATSYMPH will be available world-wide, and exists as long as the files are there to be downloaded and there is a GPS signal. This may be the first SATSYMPH, but it won’t be the last. SATSYMPH is not just a performance, it is a vehicle for a totally new way of creating and experiencing music and poetry.
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