smudge

smudge attempts to take the tuba’s sound and blend, smear and shade it in the same way a visual artist would create a charcoal drawing. The two electronic effects used in the piece serve this goal. Reverb, which acts like the damper pedal of a piano, blurs the sound horizontally in time while ring modulation creates pitched sidebands around the tuba’s sound, blurring the sound vertically. The melodic material is also “smudged” in a similar way. The materials always heard with reverb are musically expanded in a vertical direction while the materials associated with ring modulation are horizontally developed – creating a paradoxical and elastic experience with an instrument that usually draws in a straight line.