The Home Planet

Samuel Pellman (music), Lauren Koss (video) (Hamilton College (Pellman), independent artist (Koss), Clinton, NY USA)

spellman@hamilton.edu : http://www.musicfromspace.com
tajiandivy@yahoo.com

ABSTRACT:

The Home Planet consists almost exclusively of environmental sounds that were recorded within a short distance of my home. As with many of the classic concrète works of the 1950’s, the listener can often identify familiar sounds (for instance, of birds singing at dawn, the bells of a nearby church, telephone touch-tones, lambs and chickens on a friend’s farm, an auctioneer, a toy train whistle, a passing truck, children’s voices, a brook in a nearby woods, etc.). These familiar sounds are, in effect, “themes” and are subjected to an enormous range of transformation by such classical techniques as speed transposition, reversal, multiple-delay, and filtering, as well as more recent techniques, such as granulation, time stretching, and vocoding. Perhaps this digital musique concrète can provide a sense of the musicality that can be heard in the sounds of a summer day in upstate New York.

The video, shot over two years, spans the East coast of the United States, from Florida to Maine. These beautiful images, along with the sounds, remind us of the possibility that our home planet may be uniquely congenial to life in the universe and remind us of our imperative to take better care with it.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES:

Samuel Pellman has been creating electro-acoustic and microtonal music for nearly four decades. Many of his works can be heard on recordings by the Musical Heritage Society, Move Records, innova recordings, and Ravello Records. Recently his music has been presented at festivals and conferences in Melbourne, Paris, Basel, Vienna, Montreal, New York City, Beijing, Capetown, Buenos Aires, Taiwan, Perth, and Prague. He is also the author of An Introduction to the Creation of Electroacoustic Music, a widely-used textbook. He teaches music theory and composition at Hamilton College, in Clinton, NY, and is co-director of its Studio for Transmedia Arts and Related Studies (STARS). Further information about his music can be found at www.musicfromspace.com .

Lauren Koss has found her home in Downeast Maine, working at The Tides Institute & Museum of Art, in the quirky and gorgeous city of Eastport, easternmost city in the U.S. Lauren’s video works have been screened in Paris, South Carolina, Connecticut, New York City, Beijing, and Cologne, among other places.