Dialettica Liminale
Dialettica Liminale
sound installation
2022
Sound diffusion: 10 channel self constructed speakers
Dialettica Liminale is a site specific sound installation dedicated to the compositional thought of Salvatore Sciarrino, created by the sound Nicola Cappelletti, together with Mattia Parisse for the Blooming Sciarrino event.
A 10-channel system of self-built loudspeakers, Dialettica Liminale (by Nicola Cappelletti), uses the Conicetra sound sculpture (by Mattia Parisse) as a sound source to inhabit the acoustic space, letting the resonant frequencies of the architectural environment emerge through a repeated process of overdubbing the original sound with the echoing resulting sound.
A generative algorithm asymmetrically spatializes the sound with a random temporal granulation thus creating a sound ecosystem sensitive to every minimum timbre variation.
Dialettica Liminale is a commission by Opificio Sonoro.
Performances
10/15.07.2023 - Domus Pauperum, Perugia (IT)
Grand Mother Bretagne
Grand Mother Bretagne
sound installation
2019
Duration: 25'00''
Sound Diffusion: 5 exciters on 16 mt harmonic steel sheet and a 2.1 reinforcement system
Brittany's version of the conceptual sound installation by Opera Bianco, a work of sound and plastic art, a multi-perceptive environment in which the circular movement of the audience completes its choreographic intention.
Concept: Vincenzo Schino
dramaturgy: Marta Bichisao, Ivan Schiavone
sound design: Nicola Cappelletti
field recordings: Marta Bichisao, Vincenzo Schino
text editing: Ivan Schiavone
production: Opera Bianco
Brittany's version of the conceptual sound installation by Opera Bianco, a work of sound and plastic art, a multi-perceptive environment in which the circular movement of the audience completes its choreographic intention.
Concept: Vincenzo Schino
dramaturgy: Marta Bichisao, Ivan Schiavone
sound design: Nicola Cappelletti
field recordings: Marta Bichisao, Vincenzo Schino
text editing: Ivan Schiavone
production: Opera Bianco
Performances
16.05/16.10.2019 - Murmures, installations cinétiques et sonores, La Briqueterie, Saint Brieux (FR) [premiere]
09-11.07.204 - You Are Here - Auditorium San Francesco al Prato, Perugia (IT)
Evolution 221
Evolution 221
acousmatic binaural site specific composition
2022
Duration: 7'37''
Sound diffusion: binaural (headphones)
Evolution 221 is an electroacoustic piece that investigates the relationship between man and nature from an acoustic point of view, investigating the ecological and sustainability aspects of that relation. Written in connection with the sound and visual context of the Pharo Park of the city of Marseille, to be performed only through an headphone concert in the same location, the piece presents an electroacoustic processing of discarded and recycled sound materials, deliberately elaborated to find an ideal acoustic imprint of all the passages and crossings that this place has seen over the centuries: the city, the sea, the port, the view of the horizon lines, the park and the human relationship with nature, make up an ideal sound time lapse through space and time, imposing a reflection on the kind of evolution we are participating in.
Performances
03.07.2022 - Viberation #4, Parc du Pharo, Marseille (FR)
DHG
DHG
audiovisual fixed media
2022
Duration: 9'44''
Sound diffusion: stereophonic
DHG is the audiovisual version of the electroacoustic piece Dissipatio HG (for bass clarinet and electronics).
Both works are an homage to the same title post-apocalyptic novel by Guido Morselli, published posthumously in 1977.
Video direction and music: Nicola Cappelletti.
Le Spectre Rouge
Le Spectre Rouge
audiovisual fixed media
2021
Duration: 5'47''
Sound diffusion: stereophonic
Le Spectre Rouge (Pathé Freres, 1907) Courtesy of Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino.
The music of this version of Le Spectre Rouge are composed by Nicola Cappelletti e Nicola Fumo Frattegiani for the SMC Sound and Music Computing Conference 2021.
The soundtrack was created using a very narrow palette of timbres, to accommodate the claustrophobic and alienating inclination of the events that come to life within a place that is instead kaleidoscopic, deep and surreal. Sounds are mostly coming from manipulations of white noise and concrete sounds that play on different environmental levels, underlining, with a current point of view, what today appear as errors or inaccuracies in video editing and post production. For the same reason, few selected sound processing techniques were used, which guaranteed synesthetic unity between listening and vision: time-stretching, pitch-shifting, ring modulation and granular synthesis. The incursion of musical fragments from different periods and different styles aims to outline an ideal path between different historical eras, as in an intuition of possible futures (up to nowadays), affirming the visionary and avant-garde nature of the film, where the magical and surreal appearance of screens and containers that transmit images in motion constitutes a dazzling foreshadowing of the television medium, of streaming habits using devices and wall mapping techniques.
Dissipatio HG
Dissipatio HG
for bass clarinet and electronics
2020
Duration: 9'40''
Sound diffusion: 3 frontal loudspeakers with subwoofer and 2 exciters on two steel cans.
Dissipatio HG is an homage to the same title post-apocalyptic novel by Guido Morselli, published posthumously in 1977 and written shortly before his death by suicide, which is also the theme of the novel: the dissipation of the entire human race is the sudden and unexpected context in which the suicide loses meaning. Only audiovisual residuals and mechanical devices remain to testify the past existence of mankind, in a mediated new relation with the world where the concepts of time, space and language are newly defined paradigms.
The piece reveals a sound dramaturgy, a search for a relationship and for a new language in which the voice of the bass clarinet tries to reconstruct his selfawareness in a context of illegible signals and disregarded responses, where the electronics shape the perception of time, and the accidental synchronicities are nothing more than a lack of mimesis of residual and no longer present sounds. The dissipation of the sound matches the loss of direction, emphasized by the sound degradation processes and the diffusion through transducers applied to steel cans, which flank the more canonical diffusion of electronics.
Bass clarinet: Raffaella Palumbo
Awards
XV Premio Nazionale delle Arti 2019-2020, Electroacoustic composition
Performances
27.10.2022 - XXIII CIM, Auditorium Mole Vanvitelliana, Ancona (IT)
13.10.2021 - ElettroAQustica Festival, Paper concert hall - Auditorium Shigeru Ban, L'Aquila (IT) *premiere
Ordine e Mutilazione
Ordine e Mutilazione
sound poetry | spoken words | fixed media
2019-2021
Duration: 37'00''
Sound diffusion: stereophonic
Ordine e mutilazione is an electroacoustic fixed media composition that comes from the book “Ordine e Mutilazione” (Pietre Vive Editore, 2016) by the Italian poet Elena Zuccaccia.
The musical writing dialogues with the voice, reconstructing the dramaturgical structure of the poem, allowing the emergence, in a musical form, of roles and deep narrative dynamics. This process of
original text, a new context where poetry comes to life in a continuous dialogue between the physical body
(the voice), literary body (the poem), and the sound body, thanks to the synthesis techniques used and the
processing of concrete sounds and of the voice itself.
Voice: Elena Zuccaccia.
Performances
18.05.2019 - Bologna in Lettere, Sala Teatro Costarena, Bologna (IT)
14.04.2023 - On air / On site, Institute of Solology, Deen Haag (NED)
22.04.2025 - Ordine e Mutilazione album release, Indigo Art Gallery, Perugia (IT)
Macello
Macello
for fixed media
2017
Duration: 5'19''
Sound diffusion: stereo, octophonic
Macello starts from some excerpts taken from the collection of poems by Ivano Ferrari (Mantova, 1948), published with the same title by Einaudi in 2004.
Voice: Fabrizio Cruciani
The composition develops entirely from the reciting voice samples, as all the sounds are the result of it's elaboration. The search for an internal dramaturgy makes the three "stanzas" of the text correspond to three acoustic environments, linked by a narrative thread with the sound elements build, deny, alternate, add up, collide. The initial search for a defined vocality, a metaphorical search for the sense of the human, leads instead to the dissolution of the voice, a parallel to the dissolution of the element of humanity. The process of construction and destruction of the voice in its intelligibility has as its counterpart the emergence, at first avoided and then inevitable, of a resulting rhythm, even if inconstant and not coherent. In this dialogical relationship of tension, the resonances and formants of the voice are then used to set up an inharmonic background context, devoid of any hypothesis of tonal resolution, to arrive at a final scenario in which the "life that begins again" is totally transfigured and left adrift of uncontrolled and dehumanized developments.
Performances
05.11.2021 - eviMus, Saarbrücker (DE)
23.06.2018 - Verso la Meta Musica, Conservatorio G. Martucci, Salerno (IT).
09.10.2017 - Ver-v #3 Vox Electri, Auditorium del Conservatorio B. Marcello, Venezia (IT) *premiere
HypnogramFor #1
HypnogramFor #1
fixed media
2018
Duration: 5'33''
Sound diffusion: stereophonic
This piece represents the translation into musical parameters of the physiological elements of the sleep cycle phases, reading an hypnogram as a score for electronic music and a score for structure. The hypnogram is used as a guide to build an algorithmic composition where the descriptions of the elements proper to the electrical activity of the brain for each phase, provides a set of electro-acoustic elements, processes and sound modifiers, at the same time suggesting the nature and the type of the sound material used in those processes.
Vormittagsspuk
Vormittagsspuk (Ghosts before breakfast)
Audiovisual fixed media
2018
Duration: 8'40''
Sound diffusion: stereophonic
Ghosts Before Breakfast (Vormittagsspuk) is a silent film by Hans Richter (1929). The original accompanying score composed by Paul Hindemith was destroyed by the Nazis as "degenerate art".
The expressive and communicative power of this Dadaist film remains current even ninety years later. The recreated sound path focuses on the ever-present reflection on the rebellion against the determinism of a pre-established order: both objects that deny their function, as much as human beings who tend to escape, almost by sublimating, the totalitarian and annihilating tendencies of the ideologies of the first half of the 20th century. This opposition of the human being to a materialistic and functional conception of man and society echoes more than ever in the contemporary historical period. The new sound environment imagined for the film represents these contrasts, updating them in the research and elaboration of stamps and cultural references, proposing a new perspective of reflection in which the distance between the two historical periods is narrowed by tracing new dimensional paths.
Music: Nicola Cappelletti
Performances
01.01.2001 - Segnali
Monades +
Monades +
fixed media
2019
Duration: 6'52"
Sound diffusion: stereo
Monad (from Greek μονάς, “singularity” ) may refer in philosophy variously to a single source acting alone, or to an indivisible origin, or to an elementary particle. This piece represents an investigation that originates in the exposition of a monad, created with two samples of clarinet multiphonic. Through some rhythmic elaboration techniques, different synthesis methodologies and spectral processing, a path is delineated within the sound, which explores the very nature of the elements brought into play in a system that tends to disintegrate and recompose itself in a new unit, but completely transfigured. A new monad, where every residual of harmony or assonance with the initial sound material has completely disappeared.
Performances.
21.06.2021 - NYCEMF, virtual on line festival, New York (USA) *premiere
Le Jour et la Nuit
Le Jour et la Nuit
for flute and electronics
2020 - on going
Duration: 0'40'' - 4h20'00''
Sound diffusion: stereophonic
Le Jour et la Nuit is a sequence of 176 short pieces for flute, fixed media and live electronics, composed using algorithmic composition procedures to relate music to 176 aphorisms written by the French cubist painter Georges Braque, collected in the book Le jour et la nuit. Cahiers: 1917-1952 (Gallimard, Paris 1952).
Eight different forms of notation have been formalized, associated with each piece in relation to a linguistic density parameter. All the musical parameters of the composition, as well as the electronics ones, are likewise related to linguistic, formal and / or structural aspects of the corresponding aphorism. The different notations also represent different degrees of opening of the pieces.
Performance. A Le Jour et la Nuit performance should consist of a free choice of the number and order of the pieces to be performed. As well as a book of aphorisms, this work is meant to be a collection from wich to extract the desired pieces: the criteria of this choice are left to the performers, and under no circumstances a progressive order performance should be encouraged. A performance of only “A” notation pieces is not allowed; at least one piece with “D” notation must be performed.
Le Jour et la Nuit A/V may also be presented either as an audiovisual stand alone work or an audiovisual electroacoustic performance, in wich "D" notation pieces are accompanied by a found-footage video fixed media.
Flute: Claudia Giottoli, Andrea Biagini, Giovanni Petrini, Sara Valle, Denise Tamburi.