When Hunter and I first met to discuss the shape that this project would take he brought forward to me an interesting idea; to create a piece inspired by emotions, but not the typical ones like happiness and sadness. That gave me the inspiration to explore some of the feelings/ emotions we experience, whilst also creating multiple meanings of them in each movement. I also decided that each movement would explore different elements commonly associated with electro-acoustic pieces. While duplicity typically means to be deceitful, in the first movement I instead explored the literal “double-ness” of having the saxophone repeated with an echo. In this case, the “doublespeak” more comes from the relationship of the material the saxophone is performing and how the electronics processing echoes the performed material. The second movement’s relationship to the feeling of “nostalgia” is a bit more direct than the first movement. The saxophonist takes the roll of cueing fixed media files and playing alongside them. The nostalgia comes from both the harmonic language, making allusions to noir-inspired soundtracks and using electronic accompaniment that uses sounds that wouldn’t be uncommon in 8-bit video games of old. The final movement is both a pun and a description of the movement’s challenges. “Synchronicity” is the concept of coincidental circumstances, but it’s also a term for things being synchronous. This movement is asynchronous to its core by using loops that aren’t locked to a grid and are instead independent of one another, sometimes almost coincidentally lining up. As for the title of the piece, it is more of a fun joke than anything else. I had noticed so many saxophone pieces tend to have the name “___ Bird.”