The first two of the phase pieces Steve Reich made in the sixties, working with recorded sounds and tape loops, were It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966), both of which are made of two loops of the same fragment of speech slowly going out of phase with each other and then coming back together as the two tape players run at slightly different speeds. I was curious to see if I could make phase pieces with Sonic Pi, and it turns out it takes little code to do it.
Here is the beginning of Reich’s notes on “It’s Gonna Rain (1965)” in Writings on Music, 1965–2000 (Oxford University Press, 2002):
Late in 1964, I recorded a tape in Union Square in San Francisco of a black preacher, Brother Walter, preaching about the Flood. I was extremely impressed with the melodic quality of his speech, which seemed to be on the verge of singing. Early in 1965, I began making tape loops of his voice, which made the musical quality of his speech emerge even more strongly. This is not to say that the meaning of his words on the loop, “it’s gonna rain,” were forgotten or obliterated. The incessant repetition intensified their meaning and their melody at one and the same time.
Later:
I discovered the phasing process by accident. I had two identical tape loops of Brother Walter saying “It’s gonna rain,” and I was playing with two inexpensive tape recorders—one jack of my stereo headphones plugged into machine A, the other into machine B. I had intended to make a specific relationship: “It’s gonna” on one loop against “rain” on the other. Instead, the two machines happened to be lined up in unison and one of them gradually started to get ahead of the other. The sensation I had in my head was that the sound moved over to my left ear, down to my left shoulder, down my left arm, down my leg, out across the floor to the left, and finally began to reverberate and shake and become the sound I was looking for—“It’s gonna/It’s gonna rain/rain”—and then it started going the other way and came back together in the center of my head. When I heard that, I realized it was more interesting than any one particular relationship, because it was the process (of gradually passing through all the canonic relationships) making an entire piece, and not just a moment in time.
The audio sample
First I needed a clip of speech to use. Something with an interesting rhythm, and something I had a connection with. I looked through recordings I had on my computer and found an interview my mother, Kady MacDonald Denton, had done in 2007 on CBC Radio One after winning the Elizabeth Mrazik-Cleaver Canadian Picture Book Award for Snow.
She said something I’ve never forgotten that made me look at illustrated books in a new way:
A picture book is a unique art form. It is the two languages, the visual and the spoken, put together. It’s sort of like a—almost like a frozen theatre in a way. You open the cover of the books, the curtain goes up, the drama ensues.
Miskatonic University Press