Steven Leffue: Music

Work Samples

Quiet, Comfort
by Toshiki Okada

Immersive Spatial Sound Design
Hoi Polloi Theater Company

One of the characteristics of MacArthur Genius Mimi Lien's set designs is the concept of a room within a room. For the premier production of Toshiki Okada's Quiet, Comfort, audience members were led into a white room whose floor was made up entirely of a giant mattress, where performer Julian Rozzell Jr. and Stacy Robinson romped and reeled in complete theatrical immersion. I composed soundscapes and musical interludes (choreographed by Stacey Grossfield) spatialized on a 6.1 surround sound system hidden in the walls and underneath the floor.

The work included personal homages to Terry Riley, Merzbow, and Borbetomagus.

Contrafactum

Virtual Sound Installation
Unity, Pure Data

I founded BLD Design Group (Blackwood, Leffue, & Drashner) with colleagues from Carnegie-Mellon and Case Western universities to research the artistic possibilities of using app forward programming to create virtual sound installations.
Inspired by Qi Mengjie's piece Echoes from Woodblocks at Peking Opera, Contrafactum is a site-specific, multi-channel, augmented-reality installation presented to an audience through smart phone application and headphones. Using data from American wars abroad over the last 20 years, Contrafactum serves as a lens through which to grapple with the scope of destruction, and a space from which to consider the origins and effects of war. A “contrafactum” in choral music is the substitution of one text for another without substantial change to the music. Similarly, this piece keeps the original idea of sampling limited sources to produce washes of sound and rhythmic gestures while substituting a new expression/topic of examination.

Aiis

Intelligent Improvisation System

Pure Data

About 10 years before the appearance of Open A.I., I created Aiis (Artificial Intellegence Improvisation System) with atomic physicist Grady Kestler. The basic idea is that musical decision making is based on a relatively finite system of decisions, the behavioral proclivities of which can be mapped in Pure Data using narrowly defined random activity and gaussian distributions is used to drive functionality of various synthesis methods.

This system for live interactive improvisation was captured in a series of albums (A Theory of Harmony, Futures) and presented at the 2016 ICMC in Utrecht, Belgium.

The Master's Tools
by Zora Howard

Interactive Composition and Spatialized Audio for Theatre

Pulitzer Prize finalist Zora Howard contacted me for a theatrical project in which she wanted to explore interactive and immersive sound for her one woman show based on Tituba, "the Black Witch of Salem". Together, we created a "soniturgy" for the existence of a sound performer named "The Unseen" performed by my long time collaborator Julian Rozzell Jr. Through composition and improvisation, The Unseen performed live processed percussion, flute, and a custom-made instrument (named "Renee" by the creative team) on immersive, surround sound audio systems at NYC's Under the Radar Festival and the Vienna Festwoche.

Knowing Not Knowing

Spatial Audio Recording & Mastering

Pulitzer Prize winning composer Roger Reynolds needed high definition audio capture for his recording session with Canadian percussionist Aiyun Huang. The recording needed to capture the spatial qualities of the visual components of the video image, capture the extreme nuances of dynamics and articulation across diverse instruments and playing techniques, and be unseen by the camera crew. The final product was mastered to present this spatialization as vividly as possible.

The Eyes of Seht

No-input Mixing and
Interactive Processing

Pure Data

The Eyes of Seht draws it's sonic inspiration from Philip White and Peter Evans, two notorious downtown free improvisors. Expanding upon my work in Aiis, I explored what happens when large groups of interactive processes formed into musically reactive systems are fed into each other.

The result is a series of compositions using interactive processing, acoustic instruments, and no-input mixing. The feedback cycles inherent in no-input mixing are drive interactive processes which create their own cycles resulting in dense textures which span the gap between digital and analogue synthesis.

The title is in reference to the cult of Thulsa Doom, who's symbol was two snake head facing each other yet stemming from the same body.

Family by Celine Song

Immersive, Site Specific
Sound Design & Composition

Hoi Polloi Theatre Company

Oscar Award winning screenwriter Celine Song present early work at my venue JACK in Brooklyn. Building on that relationship, in 2024 I worked with Hoi Polloi Theater Company to present an early play of Celine's entitled Family. Set in a living room and funded by a grant from the Edith Lutyens and Norman Bel Geddes Design Enhancement Fund, Director Alec Duffy and I created an immersive 8.2 channel theatrical audio experience installing speaker systems on floors above and below audience seating and throughout the ductwork of a Brooklyn brownstone.

I composed music and soundscapes for this piece using extended vocal techniques based on noise, plosives, and Shepherd tones mixed with Xenakis cribles (non-octivating algorithmic scale structures).

THE NEW YORKER: “A deliberately repulsive haunted-house fever dream written by Celine Song. Past Lives, Song’s delicate, realistic film, will in no way prepare audiences for how deranged this show is.” - Helen Shaw

THE NEW YORK TIMES: "Directed by Alec Duffy, Family courts disgust and other dark emotions as it pries up the floorboards of this family’s history. . . they set ablaze almost every piety about the nuclear family. If the unofficial contract between an audience and a playwright stipulates that the audience pays to be entertained or edified, Song has revised that with Family. This play wants to offend, to disturb, to create an ash heap out of your expectations. There’s value in that, too." - Rhoda Feng

BEAPnoise

9 Symphonic Movements using BEAP modular components

MaxMSP

Creating interactive systems and synthesis algorithms from scratch is a lot of fun, but sometimes using prebuilt toolkits is a great way for students and beginners to experience modular synthesis and sound design.

In MaxMSP, the BEAP (Berklee Electroacoustic Production) modules are a collection of pre-built audio and synthesis tools, designed to make it easier for users to build modular synthesizers, sound processors, and interactive systems without diving deep into programming. These modules are built to resemble Eurorack hardware components, making them familiar to users with modular synthesis experience.

I used this system to create nine movements of noise music which are symphonic in their breadth and scope. Think Bruckner mashed with Merzbow.

Albums

Full Album

A Theory of Harmony
Steven Leffue: saxophones and production
Steven Leffue & Grady Kestler: Reactive Engineering

Tandava
Steven Leffue: saxophones

on iTunes

Full Album

Poke it With a Stick/Joining the Bots
Steven Leffue, saxophone
Miller Puckette, electric guitar
Kyle Motl, bass
Oeyvind Brandstegg, reactive processing