“In a world shrouded in despair and desolation, voices emerging from the depths of pain strive to escape toward a ray of hope”.

Inspired by the composition Gesang Der Jünglinge (1955-56) and the article Four Criteria for Electronic Music (1971) by composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, this work applies, through a free interpretation, the following three criteria mentioned in the article:

Criterion 1: unity in the temporal structure.
Criterion 2: the division of sound.
Criterion 4: the equalization of sound and noise—or more precisely, of tone and noise (pitch shifting and formants).

The most complex elaborations in this composition concern the treatment of materials derived from the human voice, which served as a point of inspiration for the overall structure of the piece. Numerous elements were created using opcodes in the Csound environment (pvoc, fof, foscil, grain). For the construction of transitions (fusions) between sampled vocal material and synthetic material, sound objects were created through granular and formant synthesis. These sound objects were employed to establish perceptual hierarchical relationships of mutation and transformation (the leitmotif of the composition).

The grains and various levels of fragmentation were elaborated through amplitude and frequency modulations, which acted in different ways on the temporal density. The materials were generated with “Cecilia,” and the work was mixed on “Cool Edit Pro.”