Cantos Rituales from SOAR by Manuel Rocha Iturbide

For two digital sound tracks 1993-2003

Cantos Rituales (Ritual Singings) is a piece I planned and started to work on the nineties while living in Paris France. The main idea was to search for different kinds of field sound recordings based in prayers and ritual singing from all around the world, and to use small fragments of these recordings and to process them in the computer in order to make a composition. Eventually, with the years, I made personally different field recordings of this kind of rituals in different countries of the world (India, Japan, Guatemala, etc) that are included in the piece.
In this composition I am mixing human voices from different cultures and transforming them in different ways in such a way that at the end, the composition sounds as if it was conceived and structured beforehand. It is a sort of hymn dedicated to all human kind, where I am seeking a spiritual unity common to all, regardless of their culture and beliefs.
The different type of transformations I used, were ring modulation, granular synthesis, convolution, phase vocoder, comb filters and multi delays with the SYTER computer (I used this facility at the GRM studios in 1993 in order to generate material for this piece).
Cantos Rituales was started at the LIEM studios in Madrid Spain in 1993 and at the University of Herdforshire in 1994, but it remained unfinished until 2003 when I concluded the piece in my own personal studio in Mexico City.

Manuel Rocha Iturbide is a composer, artist and writer. His creative work comes from different approaches to the sonic phenomena; from pure imagination, programmatic ideas, conceptual art, soundscape and experimentation with different sound objects. His interdisciplinary work has led him to use photography, sculpture, installation, and visual art as a complement of his sonic work.