Plug-in Help This piece uses the Shockwave 8 plug-in. You can download the installer from here. For any problems, trouble-shooting help is available here. The beatnik plug-in is also used and will ask to auto-install as the piece downloads.

Welcome to Sonicflux, a series of online explorations into the ideas of artists and composers of our time. This first installation investigates the ideas of Steve Reich, a contemporary composer with a history of presentation with the Walker Art Center. Launch the interactive below, or read further about the artist's work.


Please Note
The beatnik plug-in is currently not available for macintosh OS X. To view this work you will have to use classic mode.

Steve Reich's work uses a vocabulary of stripped-down musical principles which are then built and layered one upon the other to create the richly textured work he is known for. Though Minimalism is the label given Reich and his contemporaries (Philip Glass, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, John Adams, among others) working in a stripped-down mode in the mid-late 60s, many of the same principles are prominent in the work of earlier composers such as Thomas Tallis (c. 1505-1585) and Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). These principles include that of long, slow, building repetition with slight variations in tone and nuance.

From experiments working with varied-length tape loops, resulting in such works as It's Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1975), he made his own discovery of what is now referred to as phase-shifting. As the two recordings go slowly out of sync and return into sync, a whole new weave of sound is created. Reich began to work with this principle in scored instrumentation as can be seen in his work Six Pianos (1973), which was later re-scored as Six Marimbas (1986). In the latter examples however, the phase-shift is different in that it is of a constant -- not increasing -- delay or offset of the pattern or loop.

Reich has also a history of interest in "process music", in which the structure of the music is apparent to the listener due to the repetition and simple, gradual alteration of the structure.

The interactive is based on the piece Six Marimbas, which has a simply constructed base: using a rhythmic pattern of eight beats, the piece begins with three marimbas playing that pattern, but with different notes for each marimba. One of the other marimbas then begins to play and builds up the the exact pattern of the preceding marimbas, but incrementally, one added note at a time, and offset, the notes of the fifth beat on the seventh beat. This two beat offset is an implementation of the phase-shift principle. In the online piece, this relationship can be created by rotating the inner ring to whatever shift interval you desire.

The surprisingly intricate and elegant sound that this simple effect creates, is then taken further in Reich's piece, by using two marimbas to emphasize some of the many melodic patterns emerging from within this now fully constructed weave of sound. These patterns transition and sometimes overlap over time, creating a multi-layered landscape of sound. The interactive piece echoes this in the use of "accent rings" which enable you to decide where to create emphasis on the cyclical sound pattern.

Further instructions and explanation can be found in the interactive piece by clicking on the question mark.



series designer/producer: trudy lane
reich programming and design: justin bakse, justin braem
many thanks to: jeff feddersen, rod smith and barb elam