Music teacher and composer Tseng Yu-chung has captured this year’s top prize at the Musica Nova, an international electro-acoustic music competition in the Czech Republic.
Tseng, an associate professor at National Chiao Tung University in Hsinchu City, won for his composition digitizing the sounds of traditional Chinese instruments.
His piece, “Points of Departure with 17 Variations,” beat out submissions by 54 composers from 28 countries around the world in the category for autonomous artificial electro-acoustic music.
It used compositional techniques such as granulation, time stretching and convolution to bring out the distinctive sounds of Pipa, a traditional Chinese stringed instrument played by plucking the strings.
The concept behind the work was “to investigate and explore all possible transformations or variations of sound,” he said.
“The technique is similar to ‘developing variation,’ as employed by Brahms and others, to work out all the transformation possibilities,” said Tseng, who doubles as director of NCTU’s Master Program of Sound and Music Innovative Technologies.
According to Tseng, his work has always sought to combine western technologies and eastern elements.
“I will always remember what my composition professor Ma Shui-long said, that the three crucial points in music composition are internationalization, modernization and localization,” he said.
Tseng is the first Taiwanese to have won first prize at the Musica Nova. (HZW)