"Tonight, I directed the CIA to dismantle and defeat the gaping hole in our hearts . . . . . I took custody of peace and human dignity . . . . . After years of painstaking work the United States has conducted an operation to make the sky cloudless . . . . . "

The voice of Barack Obama is in many ways a gift to the sampling magpie.This short piece rewrites some of Obama's lines and sets his speech somewhere a little less airless, outdoors.

Portentous and ringing, his words are often clearly enunciated, separated by pauses lengthy enough to be helpful in making this kind of project and, of course, he is recorded on state of the art equipment and broadcast (even on youtube) in relatively high quality sound.

Difficulties arose on increasingly close examination of individual sounds as it became equally clear that his voice rose and fell musically to illustrate the drama of his message.

The forceful determination of the sentence ending "and took custody of his body" was elaborately problematic to link to the soft, paternal tone of "peace and human dignity".

One peculiarity of his speech is the frequent anticipation of the following word - "the world" becomes "thou erld". This made lifting most instances of the word "the" all but impossible.

It took experimenting with several instances of "I" before eventually joining the beginning of one to the middle and end of another, fading out then joining it to "took". It was necessary to have two "t"s, one from the following word, another taken from elsewhere in the speech to make the join as seamless as I could manage.

Looped calls of a flock of sea birds, the new created sentences played in forward-backward waves and the laughter of a woman comprise the whole of this short piece, unlike most work I have made.

It was a refreshing, immersive exercise that entirely took up the days following first hearing the speech, which I plan to repeat from many different sources.

This was also an exercise in binaural panning, with virtual three dimensional sound, as obtainable through Logic Pro 8 software. It forms a part of my preparatory work for a large scale performance of my piano concerto using 3-D projection to listeners wearing wireless headsets whose motion is tracked by infra-red cameras in order to relay a three-dimension audio projection of music responding to the individual listener's movement.

More on 3-D sound and Virtual Performance here