CATEXIS (binaural) by Pablo Palacio

Catexis is the second part of a series of works centered on the analysis and development of the interaction between sonic gesture and dance gesture. Catexis explores some ideas put forward in the seminal work On Sonic Art, which are related to existence of a natural morphology of sounds present in certain phonemes.

This means that in some cases, the physiological activity of the vocal tract involved in speech production is analogical to the described phenomena in the “real world” and the sound morphology of the phonemes themselves. In this manner, the motion of the organs in the vocal tract (velum, larynx, tongue, teeth, etc) perform a miniature choreography which is revealed in the resulting sounds.

The piece explores and develops this relationships through sound transformations of four different phonemes (cl, spr, sl and st, followed by different vowels) that constitute the only sonic seed of the four sections of this composition. Each of these phonemes types have been recorded by a female dancer, Muriel Romero, and their variations suggest several types of movement qualities or efforts inspired in the Laban conception of movement analysis (floating, wringing, gliding, thrusting).

Accordingly, the realisation of the piece has been based on creative processes that merge choreographic and compositional methods, and conceived as a choreography to be perceived not visually but acoustically.

The piece has been composed using CDP and Supercollider.

More information about Catexis project can be found here:
https://www.stocos.com/en/page/catexis/

Pablo Palacio is a music composer, researcher and director of Instituto Stocos, a project focused on the transfer of concepts between art and science in a performative context. His work focuses on the establishment of perceptual connections between algorithmic processes, physical movement, and sonic images. He is a very active composer for dance, designing multiple interactive musical instruments

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