Elizabeth Hoffman

Intérieurs Harmoniques gathers six fixed-medium works that Elizabeth Hoffman composed or revised in her New York studio between 2001 and 2011. In her note she says all of them are to some extent obsessed with harmonic design and with an often unnatural resonance, and aim at a tactile quality, so that sounds seem to move through space more than through time. Sources stay recognizable only through the strangeness of their virtual images.

Resonants (2010-11), originally for 7.1 channels, imagines an enclosure without normal acoustic decay, a hothouse that traps reverberation: metals and skins, largely recorded by TimeTable Percussion, are suspended in a spatial mosaic. In Water Spirits close-miked water is reshaped by algorithms she wrote to rearrange or remove data from the waveforms. Songstressed derives almost entirely from a few short birdcall recordings provided by Rachel Mundy, parsed harmonically in what she calls a spectral approach, with one flute sound from Margaret Lancaster. d-ness starts from a recording of her piece Red is the Rows for two violins, played by Conrad Harris and Pauline Kim Harris, and from the air resonance of the violin body near the D string.

Allamuchy uses natural sounds recorded in a state park in the days right after 11 September 2001, when with no planes in the air the sounds of insects were especially clear; first released in 2006 on Neuma Records, it appears here in a version revised in 2011. Soundendipities uses physical modelling to make small objects surface from a dense vibrating texture, a “hyper-frenetic immobility”.

Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1961, Elizabeth Hoffman has taught at New York University since 1998, where she founded the Washington Square Computer Music Studio. She studied with Bülent Arel at Stony Brook and with Diane Thome and Richard Karpen at the University of Washington, and her music centres on texture, timbre, tuning and harmony at the border of noise.

CD in OGpak, empreintes DIGITALes IMED 12115, 2012.