Subsegmental by Marcus Maeder

The term and concept of subsegmental is used in psychology and perception within the context of linguistics and phonetics. There, segmental information and cognition refer to the perception of the smallest units of sound in language, i.e. the phonemes; Their equivalent in music are individual tones (or rather the cognitive characteristics of tones), which are perceived within shorter time intervals than those of whole tones. Acoustic information is perceived in a segmentary manner, i.e. through very small or short parts of a sound signal. The equivalent in visual terms would be the individual letters of a text or the individual colours of an image, for example.

Normally, we tend to perceive integral forms (melodies, words or images); subsegmental information is a qualitative characteristic of phonemes: it is important for the quality of the acoustic information but too small or short to be perceived as an individual segment; it is an unconscious, transient factor, quasi the ghost behind and within the acoustic material which constitute and shape the musical information.

subsegmental is a isomorphic approach to this topic, transposing digital recordings down to extremely low speed, concentrating on the micro area of a sample or segment. The original sound is dramatically transformed through pitch change, dithering limitations and appearing artefacts. That in itself is a common phenomenon, but the new material fascinated me: I started working on it with sound design tools to create a soundscape populated by surreal objects. The scenery of most of the pieces is somewhat barren; it is music close to emptiness and nothingness, with long intervals of silence between the sound events.

Mathias S. Oechslin, neuroscientist in the department of Neuropsychology at the Institute of Psychology of the University of Zurich, Switzerland, wrote the album notes, integrating concepts of subsegmental perception and gestalt psychology with the composed material and the basic ideas behind it. He described the gestalts appearing in his imagination while he listened to the individual pieces and expressed the associations that they conjured up in his mind; the release subsegmental has thus become a joint work on perception and imagination by a composer and a scientist. Marcus Maeder

Marcus Maeder is a sound artist, researcher and composer.

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