Stabat Mater (2011)

Stereo fixed audio

Duration: 13.15 minutes

Voices: Karen Chung, Reina Lam, Chiara Tomarelli

The Stabat Mater is a well-known 13th-century Catholic hymn to the Virgin Mary, written in Latin, that has been set to music several times. In this work, the text is used as mere sound and rhythm.

The starting material of the piece consists of three female voices reading the hymn. The female voice has been chosen to subvert the customary use of the male voice in the Catholic Mass. The selection of the readers, the reading instructions given, and the recording settings aim to generate material whose variety arises not only from the different timbral qualities of the voices, but also from a principle of varying degrees of error.

A first reading is performed by Chiara Tomarelli, an Italian native speaker who knows Latin pronunciation (1). After familiarizing herself with the text, Reina Lam, an American English native speaker with no prior knowledge of Latin, performs a second reading. Karen Chung, a Mandarin native speaker, performs a third reading with no prior knowledge of either Latin or the text. This last reading is recorded over a low-bandwidth internet connection between Rome and Shanghai, and the sound is therefore also subject to the imperfections of the transmission.

The material derived from the three readings is used in several ways, mostly focusing on the physical or perceptual interaction between voice and synthetic sound. Some musical processes driven by voice depend on machine recognition of fricative and plosive consonants, others on the mapping of certain features of the recorded voice to synthesizer controls. Another technique used is the deconstruction of the text at the level of the word, the syllable, and, when possible, the phoneme; the consequent processes of recombination use the intelligibility of the text—or, for a listener unfamiliar with Latin, the perception of a fluid language—as a compositional element.

(1) The correct Latin pronunciation is assumed to be the current Italian one. Even if there is no certainty about pronunciation at the time when Latin was spoken, the Italian one is chosen due to the role of the Stabat Mater in the Roman Church.