燒紙/soji is a collaborative installation created by myself and Kieun Song. It premiered on October 6th, 2024, in Mercer Studio at NYU as part of the Sounds of De/Composition conference. The piece runs for approximately four hours and features a process-based generative musical score composed in episodic form. Most recently, it was staged at the 2025 Diffusion Festival in Baltimore, Maryland.

This installation emerged from a year-long partnership that began in the winter of 2023, initiated as part of a broader collaboration between the Peabody Institute’s Composition and Computer Music departments. Set within an 8-channel spatial field, soji explores a harmonic dirge built from a custom SuperCollider patch and a frequency/ratio-based data structure. The software is part of an ongoing investigation into additive synthesis, with a particular focus on multichannel environments. The first two chords of Chopin’s Funeral March serve as the foundational subject, chosen for their ideal structure for harmonic and spectral manipulation. 

Each movement of Soji starts with a cloud of harmonic partials that are distributed around the 8 speakers in some way. After each playing of the two main chords, a process that manipulates the partials occurs before the next playing. One example is taking the top octave’s frequencies and halving them each time. This creates just ratio frequencies that distort the chords. Another aspect of the programming in Soji is that the fundamental ratio of how the frequencies are organized and manipulated can be changed from a doubling (octave) to 3/2 (fifth). Extending the first example, this could take the uppermost octave’s upper fifth and shift it down to the lower fifth. These dense inharmonic clouds can be filtered to harmonics of the original fundamentals. As you sit within the speakers, the clouds of sound shift from recognizable chords to noise (and sometimes back again), creating a timeless experience.

Main Script (supercollider)
Class file (supercollider)

For the full stereo or multichannel audio, please contact me at hrobb27@icloud.com
These files are not included here because of their size and duration (3.5 hours). The video below has a curated sample of stereo audio and video documentation