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The piece ​'Fires'​ was composed by taking data from the fires in Australia, and used many of the same techniques as ​my other piece on this album, Gravitational Waves​. I have been fascinated by Australia for the past couple years, and the fires that were occuring in 2019 at the time of composition were tragic events that I wanted to capture.

Certain sections of the piece are jarring, which helped convey the severity of the events. I also tried to convey a sense of tragedy by including a section of a poem by Emily Dickinson. Part of the poem was read by a computer generated voice, and later in the piece, the poem was fed through a vocoder to provide additional harmonic content. For the presentation of the piece, I overlaid aerial video of the Australian fires taken by news helicopters. I think that the video helped bring context to the presentation experience, and highlighted some of the emotion I tried to put into the piece.

The text heard in the piece is the first stanza of this poem by Emily Dickinson:

Ashes denote that Fire was —
Revere the Grayest Pile
For the Departed Creature's sake
That hovered there awhile —

Fire exists the first in light
And then consolidates
Only the Chemist can disclose
Into what Carbonates.

I'm a Queen's student going into my fourth year. I'm studying physics and music, and like to experiment with ways to combine the two disciplines. I'm looking at various careers to pursue after my studies are done, including acoustic consulting.

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from Mosaic1: Music from the Sonic Arts Studio 2019​-​2020, released April 13, 2020

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Sonic Arts @ Queen's Kingston, Ontario

The Sonic Arts Studio is located in the Dan School of Drama and Music at Queen's University in Kingston Ontario Canada.

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