[ISEA97] Artist Statement: Todor Todoroff — Obsession

Artist Statement

This work, composed quadrophonically for the Bunker 91 festival in Antwerp, Belgium, illustrates the theme Eros & Thanatos with mainly two types of sound materials:

—Spinning sounds of water are treated first by filtering and it transports one into its vortex. Then, trough the analysis of their energy and frequency content, the microscopic and chaotic nature of flowing water is revealed. This will lead to a polyphony of notes which are distributed on four acoustical chains, symbolic of life where a large amount of external stimuli, often contradictory, will sometimes significantly modify a lifetime. A feedback loop has been added to the analysis system and enables the system to react according to its own history.

—Extracts of poems by Baudelaire have been fragmented, transformed, assembled and projected in the auditory space. The evolution from micro-montage to a full sentence, goes through a succession of words whose assembly adds to perturbing mental images born of a combination of pleasure and pain, love and death.

Obsession won the Audience Prize ex-Aequo at the 1991 International Noroit—Leonce Petitot Competition in Arras, France.

electrocd.com/en/piste/imed_19160-1.4  Audio: Obsession (#4)

  • Todor Todoroff (Belgium), POLYTECHNIQUE DE MONS, Belgium.  Born in 1963, Todor Todoroff is an Electrical Engineer with a specialization in telecommunications (1987). After having done research in the field of speech processing at the Free University of Brussels, he is now head of the Computer Music Research at the Polytechnic Faculty in Mons (Belgium) where he develops computer tools for electroa­coustic music in collaboration with the Royal Conservatory of Music in Mons. He received in 1993 a First Prize for Electroacoustic Composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Brussels. His main musical work is focused on tape music, with a special interest in dealing with space and multiphony, but he also composes music for film, video and theatre productions, as well as for installations in collabora­tion with contemporary artists. He received the Prize of the Audience Ex-Aequo at the 1991 International Noroit Competition in Arras (France) and was finalist at the 1992 International Luigi Russolo Competition in Varese (Italy) and at the I. Concorso Internacional de Musica Eletroacustica de Sao Paulo 1995 (Brazil). His music has been played on the radio in several countries and has been programmed in many festivals (Ars Musica 93 and 94, ICMC 95 and 96, ISEA95, Euracousma 93, JIM 95 and 96).  todoroff.be