Sarah Belle Reid

Fold Scan Pulse, performed by Tim Held on modular synthesizer, graphic score composed by Sarah Belle Reid as part of The Postcard Project.

Here are some notes from Tim on how he approached interpreting/performing the piece:

"I viewed the squiggles as a set of voices. I eventually started calling them sisters for some reason. I wanted them all to have a similar, yet individually distinct character. The top most "sister" had a twin or shadow so I decided to add a layer of noise within that voice. They were all made with the Telharmonic from Make Noise, which made me want to challenge myself to see if I could make the whole piece with one VCO. So every sound you hear is actually the Telharmonic.

I viewed the dotted lines as a sort of tinny percussion while the dots and right angles made me think of a low percussive element that kept the tinny one wrangled into the tempo of the piece.

And then finally the crescent shape is represented by a haunting melody that fades in and out while the smaller crescent-esque shape is a more jaunty melody line that comes in later.

You urged me to consider depth, density, white space and gravity while approaching, so I translated that into some more noise and multiple reverbs and delay.

I also want to note that I used the same clock for each track I layed down, but I intentionally did not sync them perfectly, so each one is slightly out of time with the next. I thought this was a good representation of folding, scanning and pulsing in a chaotic field of gravity."