Right Error by Claudio Parodi

Claudio Parodi’s Right Error is a rare listening proposition, encased inside a unique and exclusive physical product that encapsulates various stages of format evolution: a blank CD jewel case that contains a CD-shaped printed circuit board that in turn encloses a plain-circuit USB stick, inside which there are three audio formats; stereo, binaural and quadraphonic plus various accompanying texts, visuals and pcb files.
Right Error, according to Claudio’s account below, is an aleatoric electronic composition. Structural elements

and spatial diffusion are defined by processed text that is transformed by binary algorithms. The source text – ‘Round Midnight’ by Thelonious Monk – could have been anything. But the choice is symbolic: ‘Round Midnight’ is a faultless classic jazz standard composed by someone who always sought the ‘perfect mistakes’ as a performer.

But Right Error is not about errors. What generates form here is the coalescence of chance and agency: by limiting the arrangement palette within variants of glitched and warped waveforms, the composer creates a throbbing space of noise and silence through the differential between rapid spatialisation and slow, almost glacial dynamic changes. And just like its physical manifestation, it encapsulates a range of compositional concepts, rendering the listener into an observer of histories of listening.

“Composed on October the 15th, 2012, the inspiration for Right Error comes from a story about Late Great Thelonious Monk. After a solo performance, Monk looked very upset. When asked why, his answer was: “I played only WRONG errors!”. This means that right errors are possible...

The right error was made by a Schoeps CMC6 MK4 microphone during a recording session. Listening to the recording, at the very beginning a noise appeared, though no sound was yet played. It was the very first time for me, and it was the very first time for the sound engineer.
The 2”.042 error was stretched to 41’29”, and the waveform was normalized to -0.2 db. Back to Monk, by typing the lyrics of ‘Round Midnight’ in binary language, a second of silence was introduced in the waveform corresponding to 0. Grouping sound and silence seconds 3+3+2 and putting the groups at the same start led to a non-linear sequence of sound and silence events. By typing the lyrics of ‘Round Midnight’ in octal ASCII language, the sound and silence events groups were assigned to one of the eight loudspeakers.

Right Error was originally composed for an eight loudspeaker sound system.

“Silence is integral part of the composition.” —Claudio Parodi, November the 17th, 2012

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