In our latest interview, award-winning sound designer and composer Sarah Angliss discusses using Max for real-time sound design in the opera, “Giant,” as well as integrating her backgrounds in folk music, cognitive science, and robotics into live performance, amongst many other topics.
Learn more about Sarah’s work here: https://www.sarahangliss.com/
“Giant” will be opening at the Royal Opera House (Linbury Theatre) in London on March 8th, 2024. Additional information and tickets available here: https://www.roh.org.uk/tickets-and-events/giant-by-sarah-angliss-ross-sutherland-and-sarah-fahie-details
“Giant” was first commissioned by Britten Pears Arts, UK, for the Aldeburgh Festival 2023. It was supported by a Jerwood Opera Writing Fellowship
Interview by Jillian Olesen
Music by Sarah Angliss
Featuring video footage from:
Sarah Angliss
Britten Pears Arts – “Giant • Sarah Angliss & Ross Sutherland • Jerwood Opera Writing Programme • Snape Maltings)” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2h-v5e-NhoU)
Brother Bear Films – “Sarah Angliss – Live Music // Monomania Festival 2014” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0eDn07KRgLo / [brotherbearfilms.com](http://brotherbearfilms.com/))
NAWR Music – “Dust – Sarah Angliss, Sarah Gabriel & Stephen Hiscock – NAWR #35” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm_YOyCK8uM)
Sound on Sound Magazine – “SynthFest UK 2022 – Sarah Angliss – Sound World” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFD-5V_ycN4)
Supersonic Festival – “Air Loom live at Supersonic 2019” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBygAcdttGI)
Supersonic Festival & MoogLab – “Mooglab – Sarah Angliss” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-2Qhscy3ok)
Worcester Music Festival – “Soundings #2 Sarah Angliss” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN27aGbmRmA)
#sounddesign #opera #musiccomposition #robotics #3Daudio #royaloperahouse #maxmsp
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It’s always always about the sound more than the harmony more than anything else I will write something simple if it enables me to communicate a sound better J was an opera my very first opera it was a Chamber Opera so about seven musicians five singers true story an absolute Gothic horror and musically
It used a lot of instruments from the 18th century recorder Viola De gamber really really delicate instruments all the time these very delicate sounds are playing they’re being manipulated live it’s as though you’re hearing live instruments and live voices that are being sort of pulled like litoris and augmented and reversed and
All of these things which stuff that probably is quite familiar to people that use a lot of of Max MSP but very unusual to hear it in Opera so one of the things I did was I worked a lot with spectralism and I did a lot of that via Max so by spectralism
I mean rather than thinking about harmonic structure thinking about the spectral structure of the sounds that you’re working with i’ get the singer to sing things and then find ways to find out what the Spectrum of certain words were and then get the violins to sort of stretch that
Out and so it just sort of felt like very very simple but sort like a shimmer that was going on all the way underneath a lot of these very early instruments like the gamber and the recorder what I love about them is they have a a fragility of tone fragility of
Tomra they always slightly on the edge of cracking the sound and it’s like they’ve got a richness in them that’s been ironed out by the so-called improved instruments interesting inner worlds that have been ironed out I come from a sort of Folk Music and S classical music tradition that’s how I
First started performing as a kid was in folk clubs but I’ve also got a background in Electro Acoustics but it’s interesting I don’t you don’t find me working with sine waves and square waves I mean I’ll do it if I need to but that doesn’t interest me because the real
World is its own best model you get so much richness from The Real World why would you model it when you know you’ve got all this richness for free I’ve always been in dialogue with other instrumentalists and so I wanted to be in dialogue with what’s happening on the
Laptop so I started bringing robotics into my work mainly because um I wanted to have a physical instantiation of my music in the room but I’ve only got two hands and the one that you’ll see the most I go out with is the eing feeder which is a robotic polyphonic carolon
And for me what’s great about having that is that Max and the robot doing what they’re good at which is performing beyond the envelope of human performance and the humans are bringing in the real world richness the sort of data into Max and that sort of works for me
I think off the back of giant I’ve realized that what I really want to do is explore much more deeply How Sound can get under the skin what I’m thinking about is creating a situation where you feel that you’re in the middle of something that you don’t fully
Understand and you you’re feel in the kind of Jeopardy you would feel if you were seeing a really really good supernatural film that’s what’s exciting me at the moment is finding what the elements of sound are that can do that and it’s very very finely balanced
Because it’s all about the art of the almost what you almost reveal to people in sound a few years back I studied cognitive science and I was really taken by the work of the an active perception and this idea that you know you can’t Silo the senses you can’t say you hear
That and you see that and you know that actually um Ex Human Experience is the sum of all the sensory data that’s coming in all the sense data that’s coming in as we’re sort of moving through the world and so it’s it’s very exciting the fact that sound you know
You hear it as well as feel it what here anticipation you’re everywhere and nowhere is between I think what I’m after is connection and if you can find ways for sound to influence vision and vision to influence sound or sound to influence where you feel physically you know a proception thing or
A you know feeling on your skin then it’s it’s like sound is firing on all the cylinders it can and it starts to get very exciting I would say and this is a general Point really Simplicity gets you a lot further so like if you make something you might
Think oh I want to make it it does this and it does that and when I lift that up it does that and when I move this slider it does that what you’ll end up with is a thing that’s got so many variables it might as well be random and
Actually what I have discovered is if you pair things right right down to the absolute basic like you know if you’re starting out literally on the level of I’m going to make a sound or I’m going to play existing bit of music and I’m going to make a slider that enables me
To start it in different positions or that enables me to slow it down and speed it up just something as simple as that you kind of find that the simp the cause and effect the more possibilities there are to perform with it I mean I’m a theramin player and we’ve just got two
Things we’ve got volume and pitch and that is it but because it’s so simple you could take a lifetime to learn it and it’s incredibly expressive and so to me less is more and so don’t get beaten up about um thinking you’ve got to make a thing that looks
Like you know Spaghetti Junction actually just get one idea and then go to the help files and that’s the obvious thing and when I teach Max I always say people the greatest thing of all is you can go into the help file and just cut and paste them and the day that you
Realize that when you’re start out it’s like oh my goodness so that’s my thing if you like the look of something in the help file just cut and paste it and you probably don’t have to do too much you can have a whole performance out of one one idea
1 Comment
Oh I enjoyed that!! Will Giant be available in audio format somewhere, I live in Germany 🙂