This piece was created in collaboration with percussionist Bill Solomon, and was commissioned by the Yale Haskins Laboratory and New Haven Arts Council for their Mind Sets art show.  The intent of the show was to bring together the auditory research of the Haskins researchers with like-minded artists. We were paired with research by Bruno Hermann Repp on rhythmic and auditory perception.

"Dr. Repp's work in areas such as rhythmic perception, phase patterns and timing microstructures led us to explore these and other concepts in an original sound work. In some of his work, Dr. Repp analyzes the timing of dozens of pianists' recordings of the same piece, searching for similarities and divergences in their performance of pulse and rhythm.

We wanted to conduct a similar experiment, thus Matt Sargent composed a fifteen minute percussion solo (using snare drum, two toms, hi hat and a gong) which Bill Solomon recorded thirty times within the span of a week. In an attempt to maintain a consistent tempo between takes, Bill utilized a click track (inaudible in the recording) that ran a varied length throughout the recording: for example, in take number one, the click track is present throughout the full piece, while in take number thirty, the click is only present for about four measures.

Matt then overlaid all thirty takes into one single fifteen-minute track. Each successive recorded take begins to diverge from the larger whole in an independent stream as the click track is silenced. The listener will perceive the transformation from articulate unison to blurred heterophony throughout the course of the piece."

- Bill Solomon (from the Mind Sets catalog)