Vaporis Congeries Magnae, by Samuel Pellman

Vaporis Congeries Magnae

a composition of digital sounds
in two channels

duration - 1'32" 

Here is a 22 second audio clip from the middle of the piece: mp3 File (352K)

Click this image to see a compressed version (a 7.4 MB mp4 file) of the multi-media version of this work, with video by Lauren Koss:


PROGRAM NOTES:

When Voyager 2 passed by Uranus in January of 1986 it returned photographs of a big, blue-green ball of gas with few readily discernible features. More recent observations from Earth-orbit have confirmed evidence of great winds and related meteorological phenomena in the atmosphere that is Uranus. More detailed conceptions of the Uranian environment, however, must remain in our imaginations, at least for now.
TECHNICAL NOTES:

Vaporis Congeries Magnae (“Great Gobs of Gas”) was realized in Csound on a Macintosh G4 laptop computer. The digital instruments used to create the sounds include both formant wave synthesis (FOF) and frequency modulation synthesis (FM) components. The pitches of the piece are tuned in a 7-limit just intonation, with a few microtonal alternations in some places where the arithmetic provides two or more possible tunings for a given note. The virtual space in which the digital instruments are played includes a reverberation created by convolving the sounds of the digital instruments with the recorded impulse response of Wellin Hall in the Schambach Center at Hamilton College, in Clinton, New York.

Biographical information about the composer can be found here. 
Vaporis Congeries Magnae is published by the Continental Music Press.
copyright 2003 Samuel Pellman. All Rights Reserved. 

To obtain performance materials or for further information, contact: .

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