After surveying Truax's granular synthesis program for some time (see Monument), I also started to pay attention to the other synthesis possibilities within POD, which were concentrated on defining Frequency-Modulated sound objects and there position in time by means of various algorithms. While experimenting, I recorded some sequences produced in this way that I rather liked, and I started to think about possibilities to organize these in a larger form by means of canonical structures. This led to abstractions that were only used empirically in Paradigma (full scheme of declension or inflexion), but were applied very strictly in Stimmlich, which I composed one year later.

The structure of Paradigma is the result of an abstract score in which pitches and entry-delays of the sounds were qualified on forehand. In this score, the musical material is projected on a time-axis from a 'main level', towards three 'repetition-levels', on which the same material can appear in a transformed way. These transformations are based on synthesis-variants of the original sounds.
The distances in time between the 'originals' and their transformed 'repetitions' are derived from a row that also contains negative values. These negative values are interpreted as negative time-vectors, in which case the transformed 'repetition' of a sound appears earlier as its 'original'. In the 8-track version of the piece, the time-vectors also implicated the positions of the sounds within the presentation space.The first performance of the piece took place in the Arnold Schoenberg hall of the Royal Conservatory in 1993 at the occasion of my final exam in composition.

Paradigma received financial support from the Fonds voor de Scheppende Toonkunst.