The Wings of Nike Barry D. Truax

This is a collaborative work between two composers, Theo Goldberg who created the images with the aid of Vax and Amiga computers, and Barry Truax who created the music with real-time granular synthesis. The work presented here is in three sections. The visuals are based on a “sampled” visual image of the famous statue, the Winged Victory (or Nike) of Samothrace, and the music is mainly based on two sampled phonemes of vocal sound, one male, the other female. The analogy in the work is between the sampled visual image of the statue and the sampled vocal sound as the source of the synthesized music. Each is based within the human dimension but the transformation techniques extend them towards the epic and the supra-human, as at the end of the first movement.

  • Year of composition: 1987
  • Genre: Electroacoustics
  • Format: Fixed media
  • Instrumentation: computer graphic slides and 2 or 8 soundtracks
  • Software used: PODX system for sound synthesis and composition
  • Duration of the submitted work: 16:00
  • Publisher: Cambridge Street Publishing
  • Production: Sonic Research Studio, Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, British Columbia)
  • Premiere: February 26, 1988, Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, British Columbia)
  • Disc publication: The Wings of Nike (three movements) is available on the Cambridge Street Records CD Pacific Rim, CSR-CD 9101, and the four movement version on the Perspectives of New Music CD, PNM 28. The entire work is available as a video on DVD, CSR-DVD 1301.

Linked project

  • CAP
    Allik, Amies, Appleton, Austin, Bach, Bartley, Belkin, Berg, Bonnier, Bouchard…
    315 tracks

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