W_H_I_T_E_Y 11.001001

Socio-economic and racial inequity have prevailed through the US history, only until recently have small steps been taking to collapse opposing forces. W_H_I_T_E_Y 11.001001 attempts to deconstruct these literal actions into a figurative representation through sound.

In this piece, I only use one audio source. I sampled “Whitey On The Moon” from Small Talk at 125^th and Lenox by Gil Scott-Heron. The piece was recorded in 1970 to criticize the US government for ignoring social issues. I separated the waveforms from the piece into different sections. I selected the most natural designs to be used for vocals and the repetitive sections to be used as rhythmic sounds, and the continuous or harmonic spectrum sounds. By cropping out waveforms that held a certain tonal quality and combining them, I was able to achieve the audio texture I wanted.

Low undertones dominate a majority of the piece, with infrequent sporadic vocal samples. Gil Scott-Heron's voice breaks through the overwhelming darkness of the piece, resembling the persistence of the fight for equality. To construct the sweeping and jarring frequencies used to contrast the vocal samples, many levels of Digital Sound Processing on individually selected waveforms were used. This sound processing and design was achieved through the use of the GRM Tools Shuffling, Pitch Accum, Reson, Contrast, Equalize, Freeze, Delays, Comb Filters, Bandpass, Doppler, FreqWarp, and FreqShift.