In this edition of New Sounds, we hear the different ways composers combine acoustic music and electronics to create ambient and almost ambient music. 

As the 2010 Rome Prize winner of Musical Composition, Huck Hodge was commissioned to write Pools of shadow from an older sky to commemorate the first demonstration of Galileo’s telescope. This demonstration took place on the same grounds where the Rome Prize fellows live and work. This piece for live-processed piano, computer-realized sound, and video projection premiered exactly 400 years after the demonstration in the same location.

Irish composer Linda Buckley takes an old 12^th century hymn from Léonin and creates a lush soundscape with just one voice, layering several segments of Michelle O’Rourke’s singing on top of each other. In Jon Hopkins’ “Immunity,” you’ll hear typical house noises—a creaking stair, a closing door—repeat and melt into the rhythm of this piano and vocals track.  

Cóemgín Cùil takes classical music works and digitally processes them so extremely that the acoustic and original sounds are completely obscured. In “There Was No Gravity,” Cùil reverses and slows down a very famous classical piece. Can you figure out what it is?

PROGRAM #3669 Electroacoustic Music (First aired on 12/4/2014)