Steve Reich’s composition “It’s Gonna Rain” was published in 1968 and can be put into the genre of minimal music. The composition itself consists only of the utterance “It’s gonna rain” which is being repeated and played in different speeds.
The composition begins with the speech
which ends with the utterance “It’s gonna rain”. The utterance mentioned is
being repeated throughout the entire composition in various speeds. By using
fast repetition, the listener can start to hear utterances or sounds that
differ completely from the original sentence and thus make it hardly
understandable. Only through concentrated listening, the listener could be able
to keep on hearing the original sentence. I was able to hear a train ride and
the noise created by a train while driving on the railroad. This noise can also
be interpreted as a rhythm, produced through fast recurrence.
In the beginning of the song, the sentence
“It’s gonna rain” was still synchronized with the listener and therefore easily
understandable. However, due to the variation in speed, the listener is not
able to focus on each repetition and starts to blend the repetitions together
which causes the creation of different sounds and utterances for the listener.
During the composition, the composer also
switches the focus from the left audio channel to the right, or vice versa. By
attentive listening, it is also noticeable that the utterance is also being
played on different speeds on the audio channels. The right audio channel
appears to repeat the sentence on a slower level than the left audio channel
which increases the chance for the listener to create new sounds with the same
sentence in different speeds.
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