“She Was A Visitor” is a vocal piece written by Robert Ashley (1930–2014) in 1967. It is based completely on speech and is performed by one single speaker and number of singers that are divided in choir groups. Earlier this year, I was attending a course by Nicolas Collins, where I did a recreation of this piece for a performance in the TU Berlin Electronic Studio on 12 speaker multichannel. The result is an attempt to model the choir digitally using Max, allowing a computer to perform the piece on its own or interactively. You can download a standalone patch below.
Performing "She Was A Visitor" —
- Start with the speaker by loading a file or click "record" to use your own input
- Use the "play" button (or hit the space bar) to start end end the speaker
- Each choir leader will sustain a moment in time if you press the "choose" button
- The choir group will follow the leader if it is switched on using the "note" button
- After switching a choir group off, the sound will slowly decay
- The "size" parameter changes the grain size of the choir, try it!
- See the README.txt for keyboard and MIDI mappings
Speakers Elias Emken and Tanja Geke were so kind to provide the speech samples that you can start with. Here is a stereo mixdown of my performance, using the German sentence "Sie liebte den Mond":
Download the Standalone EXE v1.1 Win32 (14MB) and Standalone APP v1.1 OSX (38MB) here. I also did an Essay Paper and Technical Documentation which might be an interesting read if you're in for the details of this recreation.