One of the earliest full-length pieces I ever wrote is Fantasy for String Quintet (2014); the second movement is titled “Elegia.” (I cannot recall what compelled me to write an elegy at thirteen years old!) artifact: Elegy is an attempt to reflect on this work of my past and to examine the nature of the elegy, which here serves to mourn not bodily death but the constant smaller dissolutions of identity intrinsic to lived experience.

To begin, a live audio recording of “Elegia” was taken into Audacity, then tempo-compressed and re-expanded to its original length three separate times in increasing degrees of compression. To perform this operation, Audacity uses a high-quality tempo change algorithm called sub-band sinusoidal modeling synthesis (SBSMS). In short, SBSMS performs a short-time Fourier transform (STFT) of the input sound in fixed chunks, or windows, and reconstructs its frequencies using oscillators over the new target length. The nature of the windowing inherently constrains the frequency and time resolution with each successive compression and re-expansion of the file, which not only corrupts the accuracy of its spectral content but also adds unintended presences in the sound called artifacts. The “artifact” in the title thus serves a double meaning, referring also to “Elegia” as a distant relic of my personal past.

The final layer of reconstruction was the transcription of these renderings for an ensemble of acoustic instruments. With the help of the Orchidea package for Max, I drafted orchestrations of the new sound files. Further algorithmic processing of each instrument’s onsets, durations, and dynamics was done in bach to mimic the particular expressive qualities of the files, while preserving the metrical and structural framework of the original. The three pieces that comprise artifact: Elegy call upon the performers to artificially patch together the disparate sonic content as one organism—by necessity, they grow in ensemble size as well as rhythmic and microtonal complexity. In the third piece, the full string quintet of “Elegia” is restored along with ten other instruments.

I have taken to labeling the written pieces as “simulacra,” drawing upon the concept of the hyperreal developed by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007). In presenting three copies with no original, the line between identifiable reality and representation is subjected to a poignant process of blurring and ultimate collapse.

—JZ