Q was composed entirely using computer based synthesis techniques. Besides being a revisitation of techniques I have not used for some time the project posed the challenge of generating warmth and naturalness from inherently cold and unnnatural sound materials. When working from concrète sound sources the composer automatically inherits the natural timbral evolution of the source sound - when synthesising sound from scratch timbral evolution must be instilled by the composer. The second challenge posed by working with synthesis is to create timbrally complex and therefore interesting sounds. When working with synthesis the very act of synthesising demands a complete understanding of that sound. (When operating sound processing techniques upon concrète sound sources an understanding of the timbral makeup of the sound is not a prerequisite.) Therefore in order to synthesise complex sound an expansive understanding of sound phenomena is required.
The techniques of synthesis used were: additive synthesis, subtractive synthesis, frequency modulation synthesis, wave-shaping synthesis and granular synthesis. These techniques were carried out almost entirely using the program Csound as the platform. Notably the 'real time' version of this program DirectCsound was used. This aspect was crucial to the project I feel as it allowed certain passages to be 'performed' rather than being merely pre-programmed. This is therefore a response to the aforementioned problem of instilling warmth in the essentially cold environment of synthesis. A response to the issue of creating controlled complexity was the use of the Csound score generating programs Lscore and Cmask. These programs allow the user to define rules and boundaries and therefore a process which incorporates predictability, randomness and probability with which the computer then carries out the synthesis process.