Hanging Betsy,
stereo audio piece by Roger Dean and Hazel Smith (austraLYSIS), 2007.

(A component from their 27 minute sound technodrama The Afterlives of Betsy Scott, with text by Hazel Smith, sound by Roger Dean. This was commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and realised in June 2007 in their studios in Sydney).

The Afterlives of Betsy Scott interweaves spoken text, sound and technological manipulation of voice and sound. The work focuses on events leading up to the hanging in 1863 of Elizabeth Scott, who was the first woman to be executed in the state of Victoria, Australia. Elizabeth was accused, together with her alleged co- conspirators David Gedge and Julian Cross, of murdering her husband. But there was no direct evidence to convict her, and there were mitigating circumstances. The piece explores the ambiguities around the case and Elizabeth's character, and mixes historical documentation with fiction. Combining drama, narrative and poetry, it moves in and out of time and between real and unreal environments.

Hanging Betsy is a freestanding version of three segments of the radio piece, in which several transformed versions of a small number of phrases written and performed by Hazel Smith are mixed together with the performed original.

     The first segment original text is:
no place for a woman, woman as place
the bush thick-filled with high pitched murmuring
woman as vampire or victim of praise
lives which have never morphed into legend

The second segment is:
they cannot talk but the record marks them
the warp of tongues threads the weft of fiction
one voice morphs, several voices are one
is this me or Elizabeth speaking?

The third is:
not for what she did but for who she was
not for what she did but for how she seemed
not for what she did but because colonial law
closed its ears and crushed her

the writer becomes the words she has written
what has been loses itself in what is
the creator kills but dying revives
a miscegenation of fact and fiction

These texts appear sequentially in Hanging Betsy, together with transformations carried out in MEAP software. The first is segmented on the basis of pitch gradients; the second on the basis of spectral flatness and chunk power; the third primarily on chunk power but together with beats (which of course are not present in the original in the normal musical sense of the word beats). The MEAP composer algorithms used were primarily SimpleSort, IntraChunk and Headbang, but multiple processing ofeach text was undertaken, and an edited selection is used. The MEAP products are also juxtaposed in the audio space with two other transformed text phrases: 'I too am both dead and alive', and 'the roles you can play, the spaces you can shape, the presumptions you can rearrange', both of which are processed by time-variant vocoding in SoundHack. The whole was mixed in ProTools, and there are distinct audio environments for some of the components, characterised by reverberation properties.



Ubasuteyama

Ubasuteyama is a piece about the practice in Japan of ubasuteyama (grandmother throwing mountain) whereby an elderly relative was taken up a mountain and left to die. The practice, which arose during feudal times, was most common in times of hardship caused by famine or drought, and was the basis of a film by Shohei Imamura, The Ballad of Narayama. The piece also refers to a Buddhist allegory —designed to illustrate self–forgetfulness and concern for others —about an old woman who was taken up the mountain and scattered twigs to help her son find his way back.

Ubasuteyama is based on a poem by Hazel Smith, reproduced below, and uses a new microtonal scale created by Roger Dean. This scale is one of a series of 6 new scales designed by Dean. The scales are based on the prime number series, and use the first 41, 51, 62, 71, 81, or 91 of it. Each successive frequency in the scale is a base frequency multiplied by successive primes up to the chosen number. This results in a scale which does not have any repetitions of intervals (where an interval is a given ratio between two frequencies), unlike virtually all previously used scales. For example, it lacks precise 'octaves' (a doubling in frequency between two notes), the hallmark of Western classical music. The unfamiliarity of the scale is mainly exploited in the melodic component of the piece, which uses an instrument based on inharmonic timbres related again to the prime number series. It is also used as part of the structuring of the pitch components of the 'wind–like*#39; noise timbres which characterise the piece.

The text is performed by Hazel Smith and was published on the CD, Music of the Spirit, Wirripang, 2008.

Ubasuteyama

winds the story

when a Japanese woman was seventy years old
her son would take her up the mountain
on his back
and leave her there to die

ubasuteyama

throwing away grandma mountain
mountain throwing grandmother away
some say it was an ancient custom
some say it was only a folktale
bones discarded blind hill graveyard knowing

how did her afterglow find its way?
did it rise to the clouds?
did it slide down the slope?

imagine the cold at night
picture the pitch black
of abandoning your mother

one old woman when she was carried up
plucked twigs and scattered
a wavering trail
so her son could trace his path back

this is the luminous tale that Buddhists tell
others left buried

grandma throwing mountain away
discarded graveyard growing

Ekleksographia:
Wave Two

May, 2010

Poetry

Roger Dean

Roger Dean is a composer/improviser, and a research professor in music cognition and computation at the MARCS Auditory Laboratories, University of Western Sydney. He founded and directs the ensemble austraLYSIS. His creative work is on 30 commercial audio CDs, and he has released many digital intermedia pieces. His 400 research publications include seven books in the humanities. Previously he was CEO of the Heart Research Institute, Sydney and then Vice–Chancellor and President of the University of Canberra.


Hazel Smith

Hazel Smith is a research professor in the Writing and Society Research Group at the University of Western Sydney. She is author of The Writing Experiment: strategies for innovative creative writing, Allen and Unwin, 2005 and Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O'Hara: difference, homosexuality, topography, Liverpool University Press, 2000; co–author of Improvisation, Hypermedia And The Arts Since 1945, Harwood Academic, 1997 and co–editor with Roger Dean of Practice–led Research, Research–led Practice in the Creative Arts, Edinburgh University Press, 2009. She is also a poet, performer and new media artist, and has published three volumes of poetry, three CDs of performance work and numerous multimedia works. Her latest volume with accompanying CD Rom is The Erotics of Geography: poetry, performance texts, new media works, Tinfish Press, Kaneohe, Hawaii. Formerly a professional violinist, she is a member of austraLYSIS, the sound and intermedia arts group. Hazel was the founder editor of inflect, an online international journal of new media writing based at the University of Canberra (2004–6) and is now co–editor with Roger Dean of soundsRite, a journal of new media writing and sound, based at the University of Western Sydney. Her website is at www.australysis.com