Habits of Man is a solo audio work for the Future Music Oregon concert series at the University of Oregon.
One late evening, a house party next to where I was living at the time got out of control and turned into a massive shouting fest, bottle throwing, and fight between various attendees of the party and also some passersby. As soon as the chaos began, I grabbed my digital audio recorder and started recording the entire incident. I then took segments of the source audio and heavily manipulated it with the programs Kyma and ProTools to create a work meant to capture and amplify the uninhibited negative energy of the confrontations.
Almost all of the audio in the piece is digital manipulation of various human voices. The one exception is one small segment of audio which is digital manipulation of a person clapping.