Otto Wanke: Fluttering Substance

Short Description / Kurzbeschreibung

My piece Fluttering Substance deals with short audio excerpts from interviews with the American writer William Burroughs, in which the author describes his Cut-up technique. The internal sonic qualities of the excerpts shape the individual electronic gestures and at the same time they form a tectonic organization that corresponds to the described Cut-up technique.

In seeking parallels between the spectral properties of the excerpts and their effects on the formal construction of the piece, my intention was to further develop the technique of the spectral resynthesis.

In its classical conception, individual partials of the sound model are assigned to different acoustic instruments, creating a characteristic ambiguity between harmony and timbre. In my conception, however, I used electronic processes such as granular synthesis or waveset distortion to resynthesize the original speech model.

While this action results in the loss of the original plasticity of the resynthesis, it also serves as a starting point for the generation of new idiosyncratic material that reflects the original model on the basis of a more abstract spectral correspondence.

Subsequently, I linked the resulting resynthesis to vertices (points in 3D space) to create an additional visual plane to these audio processes.

Interprets And Location / Interpreten und Ort

Different Locations in Lower Austria

Short Biography / Kurze Biographie

Otto Wanke (*21.12.1989)
is composer and medial artist living in Vienna. He has undertaken a series of musical studies: first jazz composition in Prague, later instrumental, medial and electroacoustic composition – under Karlheinz Essl, Iris ter Schiphorst and Wolfgang Liebhart in Vienna. 2018 he was employed as an assistant at the department of ethnomusicology at the music university of Vienna and he started doing PhD program with focus on spectral music (MDW Vienna, under Gesine Schröder). Additionally, he has been active as a performer of electroacoustic music, working as a soloist as well as in cooperation with other musicians. Since 2020 he has been teaching electronic composition and multimedia at the Janacek music university in Brno.