Program Note

This piece was composed in 2000 as the first of a set of works that engage the relationship between chemical compounds and the human experience.   Adrenaline  presents a dramatic sequence of psychological states associated with the experience of this commonly produced compound.  The piece projects these psychological states in a fast-paced continuity that maintains an anxious state from beginning to end.  The four trombones are treated virtuosically in both the technical requirements of the piece and the need to project a musical performance that carries the psychological influence of adrenalin on the musical experience.

The computer integration with this work acts as a transformative screen against which the trombone music is presented.  The computer records the live performance as it is happening and treats the performance audio as source material for pitch transposition and temporal development that is played back out in real-time.   The computer moves through 23 pre-programmed states which record and process sections from the actual live performance of the piece.  Examples of these processes include a sweeping filter bank, pitch transposition, time stretching, and audio transformation involving granular resynthesis or the inter-cutting the audio files in smaller and smaller time segments or grains. Many of the processes are cascaded so that the output of one process feeds the input of the next process resulting in highly transformed sound. The computer program was developed in the MAX/msp programming environment and runs on a G3 Powerbook during performance.

Adrenaline  was commissioned by Jack Schmidt of Delaware Valley College and was written for the trombone quartet of the Philadelphia Orchestra.