TRANSITION STUDIES (2024 - IP)
Four channels
DURATION:
> 1st Movement (2'03")
> 2nd Movement (4'05")
PERFORMANCES: TIEMF, 6th Tehran International Electroacoustic Music Festival | Tehran | September 14, 2024 (1st Movement)

'Transition Studies' is a collection of short pieces exploring a sonic material transformation algorithm I’ve developed since 2023. The algorithm expands on Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) — a method devised by Sakoe & Chiba in 1978 for optimal speech recognition — by adapting its framework to enable seamless transitions between two distinct musical states. The system enables composers to define arbitrary musical parameters and transition between them smoothly over a customizable number of steps. This process can generate continuous unorthodox and algorithmically mediated “raw material” that can be refined and integrated into larger compositions.

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YE ETUDE KUCHULU (2024)
یه اتود کوچولو
Four channels
DURATION 2’08”
Algorithmic warping of a short bass clarinet recording 
This tiny composition is an algorithmic transformation of a short bass clarinet recording. 'Ye etude kuchulu' translates from Persian to 'A little study'.

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FIVE CHANGES (2024 - IP)
Stereo
DURATION 8’06”

Five changes are the first studies I did, trying to develop a strategy for creating sequential transitions. In these five simple pieces, the transitions occur in the frequency and duration, and are constrained in a linear way between only two states, which are immediately presented at the beginning and end of each piece.

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KINDERLIED (2014)
Mono
DURATION 25’
PERFORMANCES: Chamber Music Hall of the University of Music Freiburg i. Br. | June 15, 2014
Musik für Lautsprecher (Concert of electroacoustic music from Iran) | Orgelfabrik, Karlsruhe | December 5, 2023

This piece follows the tradition of speech compositions. Digital transformations of sound were deliberately avoided in this work to maintain focus on the unaltered speech material. By layering whispered text, new layers of language emerge. Consonants and sibilants take on a life of their own, and new structures appear. The meaning fades, the language loses its expressive power, and becomes pure sound. Here, the simple act of whispering itself becomes a sound transformer.

The text used is the German children's song 'Hänschen klein.'

Voice: Marlene Behrmann

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IMMERWÄHREND (2023)
Four channels
DURATION 2’14”
PERFORMANCES: Musik für Lautsprecher (Concert of electroacoustic music from Iran) | Orgelfabrik, Karlsruhe | December 5, 2023

This piece is a short study on a compositional idea: I imagine that the smallest unit of a work is not a single event (e.g., a single sound with all its musical properties), but a collection of events. The individual events that form such collections are allowed to have a turbulent life in all their facets. They are compressed and stretched, experiencing dynamic, articulative, and timbral transformations. New events are also introduced into the groups, or existing ones are removed. However, they can achieve nothing as individuals, only as a collective; they only gain the meaning of their existence in the company of other events. In my composition, it is a kind of iteration that takes on a varied form each time it appears - a constant repetition of the same, which is somehow different every time! It is as if one never leaves a room, whose outer form and decoration are constantly changing, creating the impression of a continuous change of space.

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VOID PLENITUDE (2024 - IP)
Four channels
DURATION 11'27"
PERFORMANCES: '...für Lautsprecher', Concert of contemporary computer music | November 15, 2024 | Reaktorhalle of the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich (No. X)
Sanandaj Electroacoustic Music Festival | December 22-23, 2024 | University of Art and Architecture | Sanandaj, Kordestan, Iran (No. X)


A series of compositions that have emerged as a further development of a code example from the documentation file of the Demand class of the programming language SuperCollider. At the core of the compositions is the short code snippet from the help file:



(
{
var trig, seq, freq;
trig = Impulse.kr(24);
seq = Drand([Dseq((1..5).mirror1, 1), Drand((4..10), 8)], 2000);
freq = Demand.kr(trig, 0, seq * 100);
SinOsc.ar(freq + [0,0.7]).cubed.cubed.scaleneg(MouseX.kr(-1,1)) * 0.1;
}.play;
)


This code has been slightly modified to allow for various additional parameter definitions for the pieces. Consequently, all compositions in this series are derived from the same code and share the same architecture, but differ in the final landscape and it's nuances.

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WARPING TIME IN SEARCH OF SIMILARITY (2025)
Eight channels
DURATION 11’30”

In this work, I aim to create transitional structures. Touching upon the paradox of dynamic, time-evolving, and static elements coexisting, this piece investigates the interconnectedness of occurrences of seemingly unrelated things within a tiny universe —the music itself!— through the evolution of sound and the passage of time. As a composer, I have been interested in developing different approaches to creating what I label as "transitional music". In this regard, I have particularly been focused on working with larger sonic sequences rather than the metamorphosis of a single sound within itself. I envision, in simple musical terms, creating smooth crossings from one melody into another, even if they are very different! My original idea was to devise tools not strictly bound to digital contexts but also applicable to instrumental music. To this end, I developed strategies conceived on an abstract, non-musical level, making them more universally applicable and powerful. One aspect that has drawn me to using abstract algorithms —such as Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), which I will explain in the next paragraph— for creating formal musical structures is their ability to operate on a higher data level rather than on a narrow and specific set of musical aspects. This allows the results to be projected into diverse sonic properties and utilized in different musical contexts. In this work, I use a byproduct of a well-known algorithm for speech recognition called Dynamic Time Warping. The approach of the algorithm, in simplified terms, is as follows: two sequences (streams of data, e.g., audio files) are compared to determine whether their content is the same, regardless of temporal discrepancies. For instance, it can identify whether both contain the spoken word "Music", even if the word is pronounced at different speeds. The algorithm assumes that both data streams (time series) are fundamentally the same and then tries to identify and compensate for the timing differences between them. This approach has the benefit, compared to other pattern-recognition algorithms, of minimizing the influence of possible timing differences on the recognition process and result. Technically speaking, the algorithm creates a matrix that embodies a mapping from every element (data point) in the first sequence to the "most similar" counterpart in the second sequence. In my composition, I have used this “similarity matrix” (in DTW, it is called an “alignment path”) to build custom-sized interpolations between different features of my sound-sequences. In “Warping Time in Search of Similarity” these features include duration, harmonic content, filter qualities, intensity of sounds, envelope data, and sometimes localization information within the 8-channel environment.

For the performance of this piece, any arrangement of the eight loudspeakers is acceptable, as long as the speakers are placed equidistantly from each other and surround the audience (e.g. a lineup of eight speakers in a straight row would not be permissible).