Joe Zeitlin

November 2006

Hello

so a bit about myself and the idea :- well I live in Bethnal Green and am studying cello at the royal academy of music. I am also trying to compose music using sounds made from anything that makes sound. I am into improvisation, and on cello a lot of what i do tends to be atonal noise based stuff, which sometimes makes sense…

The idea for this piece is based on binaural beat frequencies created by playing two notes, one just above or below the other. The beat frequency is the difference in Hertz between two frequencies eg: one note 107Hz, second note 110Hz, the binaural beat frequency is 3Hz. In this piece this is created by trying to play two notes of the same pitch while slowly sliding up the cello. Beat frequencies come when the notes get slightly apart from eachother. These beats are magnified by 12 cellos doing (or trying to do) the same thing at once, and also the intense bass of the bed. The result is a kind of organic accellerating/ decellerating massage, within the context of a continulally rising and everlasting nightmare. There are also parts with free improvisation, often trying to evoke feelings of derranged animals such as gorillas, bears, cows etc…