Shadows (2017)

In 2017, Joachim Heintz traveled to Tehran at the invitation of my professor, Dr. Sara Abazari, and the University of Tehran’s music department, to hold a workshop on electronic music. At the time, I was a master’s student in composition at the University of Tehran and enthusiastically participated. This workshop, which I’ve provided more details about in a report at the bottom of this page, was my starting point for getting to know live electronic music and the Csound programming language.

Participants in the workshop worked in pairs on projects that were performed at the final concert. My partner, Mehrnoosh Zolfaghari, and I wrote a piece for santur and live electronics that we named “Shadows.” This piece was the result of our first attempts to enter the endless world of electronic and live electronic music.

In this piece, the santur improvises based on the graphic patterns provided in the score. Its sound is captured live through a microphone and fed into a computer. With the help of the code we wrote in Csound, this incoming sound is replayed through speakers with delays of several seconds. These delays create a kind of audio shadow, which is the reason for the piece’s name.