J. Simon van der Walt

Contemporary catalog

14/10/97 for Invention Ensemble

A couple of years ago I was in a tour bus on the way back from London, listening absently to a football match commentary coming from the television in the rear lounge. It sounded strange & stilted; the commentator paused in odd places, & seemed to have a rather small repertoire of phrases, some of which he repeated verbatim. Suddenly I twigged; it wasn't a real match, it was two people playing a video football game. I never play computer games on principle; evidently the technology had moved on to the point of having pre-recorded phrases spoken by a professional football commentator, roughly linked to the action in the game.

The effect was interesting, and I sat and transcribed a couple of minutes of the mechanical phrases, together with an indication of the length of the pauses between them, with the vague idea of making a piece.

Then it occurred to me to wonder how the computer knew whether the players were male or female. 'Stupid', I thought a moment later, 'of course it's assumed that the players are male'. Following this train of thought, I tried changing 'he' to 'she', which gave the text a whole new meaning. From here on the piece wrote itself.

Sounds