was commissioned by Arch-OS from the digital audio composer Eduardo Reck Miranda to commemorate the opening of Portland Square. It was first generated on the 15 July 2003. The generative piece feeds of the data which flows from the Arch-OS Core.

“The piece is inspired by the paradox of the origins of music, as purported by philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau described the earliest spoken languages as being composed of vocal inflections such as warnings, cries for help, shouts, etc. In the beginning, these vocal utterances primarily expressed feelings, whilst gestures were preferred to express rational thought. As human society grew in complexity, spoken language needed to become more precise and less passionate. As language followed the path of logical argumentation, those melodic aspects of the primordial utterances evolved into music instead. Music, thus, according to Rousseau, developed from the sounds of passionate human vocalisations. In this piece I wanted to compose a very passionate vocal passages but with no real human voice whatsoever. Instead I composed with “vocalisations” produced by a variety of monkeys and sophisticated physical modelling voice synthesis. I used re-synthesis techniques to create various hybrid voices by imposing synthesised human-like formants onto the spectrum of monkey sounds.”

PSQ Symphony #1 can be downloaded form the Downloads section.