Written in 2002, Voi (rex) was composed to poems by Lin Delpierre taken from his collection “Le testament des fruits”. The texts being freely arranged and even sometimes mixed. The sense, however, is still often perceptible and serves the piece’s overall expression, which is also conditioned in some aspects by the verbal structure. At the same time, the poems are used as phonetic material and suggest numerous figurations that occur right through the composition. Even the calligraphy of the letters, prolonged as wave shapes that become archetypal melodies, generates rhythmic-melodic models and spatial trajectories. Finally, some scenic movements are borrowed from how the poems are written out and punctuated.

The piece is in five movements preceded by a short introduction, each movement depending on one or more exclusive characteristics. In the first, a sustained violin note - fixed - serves as reference point for the progressive transformation - mobile – of the noise–discoloured voice (‘a bit of voice stumbling on itself’), of the singing voice and of a sort of spatial ‘vanishing point’. Profiles of all the poem’s letters, applied to the melodic curves of both voice and instruments, give the second movement its identity. These profiles are embodied in a strophic form that has the same structure as the song of the reed warbler or of Stravinsky’s Danse sacrale. The third movement is constituted from harmonic ‘tints’ traversed by blazes and framed by the voice in a form suggested by the text : ‘From part – after dazzlement – to part’. What results is a progression towards white noise, whose ‘whiteness’ displays itself as blinding light. What dominates the fourth movement is a structure: a nested form, but where the ever smaller elements packed into one another are different. A driving force ensures the transition between the sections, whose shapes come from different kinds of wave form. The last movement takes us by song to the word, through a general recapitulation of the different constitutive elements of the preceding movements. Again the poem’s letters generate the melodic profiles of the singer’s scat.
The main idea of the piece is to confront different sorts of model – to, as one might say, model models. To begin with, the singer recorded the poems standing close to gongs and a tam tam, which her voice caused to resonate. That gave, through analysis, the harmonic elements used right through the work. At the same time she recorded an improvised sequence based on various kinds of vocal technique. The recorded sounds were chosen, isolated and reworked only by editing, with no treatment. They were then presented as new models to the singer, who thus had to imitate herself, but after the recording and editing of what she had sung before. There developped in this way a corpus of vocal elements that could then serve as a model for the instruments and electronics. Some technological models (such as, for example, frequency shifting, the doppler effect, freezing within a variable frame certain parts of the sound or models derived from the letters of a poem, or even the rhythmic model provided by the poet’s speed of diction in reading his own texts) were also used in a constant give and take involving voice, instruments and electronic apparatus.

This last principally comprises a computer running Max/MSP, which controls not only the real-time treatments, such as crossed synthesis, harmonizer delays, filtering, frequency shifting, reverberation, spatialization, and so on, but also the triggering of sound files in response to the singer.
The software used in creating the piece was OpenMusic for the whole harmonic, melodic and rhythmic conception, Audiosculpt for representing and analysing certain vocal phenomena and cleaning up sounds, Max/MSP for simulating real-time treatment and PSOLA for morphing the end of the piece.
Philippe Leroux