A few more ideas about sound-music in ZYG

Some musical examples of Bebé PlimPlim can be found in an earlier post (17th July). The reason why I posted these examples and not others has to do with the nature of some sounds and music we used then, which I think could be interesting to consider for starting to talk about what could be the musical atmosphere of ZYG. In BBPP, alongside with music that has a conventional sense of form and tonal direction there are also elements of textural nature which created interesting atmospheres of "suspended time" (particularly in the show). In more recent projects with babies, for example Jardim Interior, last July. at the Gulbenkian Foundation, quite a lot of the musical material was "textural", very much influenced by the notion of soundscape. Not entirely, since there was a lot connection and fusion of these elements into music that was organised according to tonal or rhythmic structures. This  possibility of "suspending time" is not necessarily related with the "textural" vs "tonal" or "rhythmic" nature of music, there are many examples of tonal (and atonal) music that seems directionless and also many other examples of textures that carry a strong sense of direction. I am not even suggesting that an entire experience should be that way, what I am saying is that the ZYG sound experience could/should allow for a substantial amount of "suspension". In Bebé PlimPlim, apart from the voices, all the sounds were electronic. In Jardim Interior we used a mixture of acoustic instruments, environmental sounds collected at the Gulbenkian Foundation Gardens and a few electronic sounds. Very interesting results were obtained with "home-made" instruments. These type of "instruments" are the basis of a project we developed and publish as a blog under the name of Super-Sonics (a physical edition, book and CD is now undergoing with the Gulbenkian Foundation). In www.super-sonics.blogspot.pt you can find the instructions about how to build them, but, most important, many compositions that we made using these very simple, yet effective, resources. I think may of these ideas could give us interesting starting points for ZYG, particularly if we experiment on their electronic processing. During the next few weeks I will be doing some of these experiments and I will post them as I go along. Another thing I am interested in trying is to explore the immense vocal potential that Sandra has and for that I intend to invite her for recording simple vocal utterances as well as "virtual dialogues" with the voices of babies that we have recorded over the past few years. I imagine the sound atmosphere of ZYG as a collection of sounds that seem to emanate from the space (and this has very important implications  upon the sound diffusion, we will need to think of a system that looks like is embedded in the physical structure), rich and diverse, exciting and mysterious, perhaps unpredictable, yet tender and comforting as well. Ideally I think it would be interesting to give Sandra the possibility to shape the sound atmosphere, if not totally at least to a certain degree.