Audient Music
Our Only Sure Reward was composed using CSound to mangle and manipulate John F. Kennedy's inaugural address.
download Our Only Sure Reward
download CSound files
This Stuffit archive contains the orc/sco files, the pvoc analysis files, as well as the original .wav file sound bites. It is rather large (approximately 60 MB).
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Audient Music
Our Only Sure Reward
I composed this piece in 1998 while studying for my D.M.A. at the University of South Carolina. I had already composed The Racial Divide with CSound and was wanting to try my hand at it again. There's something inherently beautiful in human speech to me. JFK's
voice was so distinctive that it begs to be used this way.
Rather than experimenting with the FOF opcode as in The Racial Divide, I was more concerned with stretching the sounds like taffy. Steve Reich wrote a piece entitled Slow Motion Sound that sort of inspired me in this area. When Reich composed it, the technology didn't exist to allow him to produce the work, but the concept was sound at least. In his piece, Reich suggests that a sound be gradually slowed down without altering its pitch or timbre. I'm not a "systems music" type of composer, though I certainly see the lure of that idea, so I had a different notion in mind than simply slowing the sound down. I was more interested in using JFK's voice itself as an instrument. In a sense, it's as though he actually sings in my piece.
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I remember when I was younger (and still sometimes now) sitting and just looking at a tree or clouds or a dog or whatever for long periods of time. After a while, the mere fact that I am investing so much time in the observation tends to create meaning that wouldn't otherwise be there. I was striving for something similar with Our Only Sure 
Reward. As a composer, I had to decide which parts of the speech to use. Obviously, simply mangling the speech from beginning to end would result in terribly uninteresting music. But my own influence on the meaning of the words of JFK's inaugural address in the work is in the editing process. Picking and choosing which sound bites to use alters and mangles the meaning of the words themselves. So, in that sense, at least, my own meaning is imprinted on JFK's.
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I made heavy use of the pvoc opcode in CSound for the stretching parts of Our Only Sure Reward. There's not much I can say about how I used it other than to point you to the orc and sco files. To be perfectly honest, it was a hit or miss proposition to understand how they worked even while I was composing this piece. There are many good tutorials on how to use the phase vocoding abilities of CSound, so I won't go into great detail about it. Basically, you send a sound file to the analysis part of pvanal. CSound then performs a spectral analysis of the file by splitting it into frames. Each of these frames is, in essence, a band-pass filter with a center frequency an integer multiple of a fundamental frequency (that you provide). Then this analysis file is used to reconstruct the sound file. The groovy part, though, is that you can reconstruct this sound file with varying lengths or pitch. In other words, say the file is 1.5 seconds long. It can be reconstructed to last 5 seconds. Or .5 seconds. It's a fascinating way to work with sound. It really is like playing with taffy.
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I also made use of Andre Bartetzki's stochastic event generator, CMask. CMask is a great way to quickly create web-like clusters of events. To program these "scurrying" sounds by hand in a text editor would have taken an extremely long time. CMask does it in a snap.
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You can download the analysis files from this site if you like for perusal. There are lots of files in this bundle, though, so be forewarned. It's big! I'm including the analysis files, the orc/sco files, and the original .wav sound files. Theoretically, you should be able to recreate Our Only Sure Reward on your own computer if you have CSound and these files. I'd be very curious if anyone actually does this, so if you attempt it, PLEASE contact me and let me know what success you've had. Also, bear in mind that I don't document my compositions very well. There are meaningless and redundant notes to myself in the orc/sco files and in the .msk file as well. If they don't make any sense to you, don't worry. They probably don't make any sense to me either.