Elizabeth Hoffman - Filiforms

Program Notes

Filiforms result from a type of metal corrosion, and are unusual in that their delicate blue-green and brownish filaments are quite visible but do not weaken the metallic substrate. Filiforms also describe minutely carved lines found in ancient rock carvings.

Technical note:

At the heart of this work is the 8-channel, speaker point diffusion concept. The piece extends my interests in composing with dense textures and complex timbres. I use 8 channels here to achieve textural complexity, clarity and rarefaction of the overall sounds, and to allow control over slowly changing detail. The sounds are inherently striated, designed to interact in the diffusion space. At rare moments the speaker location points serve as loci of more discrete sound movement from speaker to speaker. No single, or forward facing, listener point of view is necessary; but a circular diffusion space surrounding all listeners is essential.