CATHAL ROCHE . Saxophone Sound Stories

Saxophonist and Sound Artist

FDK Engineering, ROscommon Coco ART@WORK 2008

Quartertone Tubular Bells, Stainless Steel (2008).

Quartertone Tubular Bells, Stainless Steel (2008).

As a solo composer-performer my musical language is a hybrid drawn from three primary sources of sound. These are tonality, the idiomatic sound language of the saxophone and speech sound. My work at FDK Engineering is concerned largely with the later of these three sources. Specifically, I have been studying the intonation of task related dialogue. I have come to hear the dialogue of work as a series of ‘games’ between two or more ‘players’. The players collaborating through a series of set ‘moves’ towards a shared objective. In these games, there is a discernible musical difference between the intonation of ‘instruction’ and that of ‘explanation’. Whilst the sound of a ‘query’ is different again. Despite the practicality and functionality of the type of language which surrounds me at the factory, the employees’ use of the paralanguage of intonation and tone show how varied and personal and subtle any language can be. As a saxophonist I use a 24-note quarter-tone scale to better emulate the micro-tones of everyday speech. Although such a scale is possible (through cross-finger-ings) on a saxophone, there are very few instruments which have this facility and so collaboration in this type of musical atonality is often difficult. And so I have chosen to use the materials and facilities at FDK to create a new quarter-tone instrument from stainless steel. The harmonic complexities of this material have challenged me a great deal and I find myself seeking engineering solutions from employees who are, naturally enough, also interested in vibration and resonance of the materials they use in manufacturing.