mouth music (mal de fleurs)

Ruth White:

"To me, Baudelaire's poems are of such unique power that they always seem to rise above the level of the personal and sometimes existential nature of their content. In this composition, I have attempted to parallel the transcendental qualities of the poetry through electronic means.

For the words, I used my own voice as the generator of the original sound to be altered or "dehumanized." This seemed practical since my experiments with the medium were too time consuming to have been easily accomplished with a collaborator.

To modulate my voice, I used a variety of techniques. Changes of timbre were achieved with filters. Tape speed changes were used to control pitch. Into the shape of some words, I injected sound waves and white noise, thus changing the quality of their sound but not the flow of their delivery. By adding reyerberation, I varied atmospheres and decreased or increased space illusions. To accent special words or phrases, I used controlled tape delays. Choruses were created by combining slight delays with multiple track recordings.

The musical settings around the voice were made with music concrète materials, a moog synthesizer, other electronic generators and conventional instruments, which were usually altered electronically.
In the translations, there was no attempt to rhyme the verse as in the original french poems. I tried only to keep the language as direct and simple as possible, for I always found that the dominating power of Baudelaire's ideas were in themselves of electrifying force."