Helium Burning: Affordances of stellar nucleosynthesis to explore timbral plasticity, form and spatialization in computer music

Helium Burning (2024) is conceived as a generative system, programmed in Max MSP, that addresses the affordances of stellar nucleosynthesis processes to explore timbral plasticity in a computer music composition practice. The triple-alpha process by which three helium nuclei fuse into a carbon nucleus in the core of a red giant star is examined in the piece. A comprehensive four-layer timbral morphing process encompasses methods of transformation of microsounds such as granulation, transposition and time-stretching of sound files as well as iterative re-synthesis procedures. As the piece progresses in time, it actualizes the transmutation of timbral substances, evoking the transmutation of atomic nuclei in the core of a star. The successive phases of the comprehensive granular synthesis method are the building blocks of musical structure; form emerges from the timbral morphing process. Thus, Helium Burning delves into astronomical processes as archetypes for conceiving open-ended musical forms. Finally, spatialization is approached as a performative analogy, connoting the essential condition of the observer as an integral part of a quantum phenomenon.