It is often mentioned that in order to perceive a musical gesture as conveying an intention, it requires movement with some sort of acceleration. The Earth’s gravity is certainly the source of acceleration that is most familiar to us, permanently exerting its force on our body and everything that surrounds us from the moment we are born. When a conductor conveys musical gestures and times using physical movements, the perception of the relation between gravity and a conductor’s gesture plays a major role on the musicians’ interpretation of it. It is also very common to see musicians freezing their motion during a musical suspension or quickly accelerating downwards into a sforzando, movements that are sometimes not technically necessary but help to prepare and convey a musical intention.

Pendulum was conceived as an exploration of the possibilities of generating musical gestures from spatial gestures, which in turn explore the use of physical models to generate accelerated spatiotemporal movements. It is a musical response to some simple questions: Can we hear gravity? Can we hear friction? Can we use them to generate musical gestures? Do we need friction to naturally stop a musical gesture generated by gravity-derived models?

It is also a demonstration of the possibilities of my spatialization software called spatium. Live recording of the première by Sond’Ar-te Electric Ensemble (Guillaume Bourgogne, conductor), at Goethe-Institut Portugal in October 2012.

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