"Sometimes at the edge of consciousness, perhaps just falling asleep or even daydreaming, sounds that are familiar will lose their usual ring and take on new meaning," says composer Paul Lansky in the introductory notes to his 1990 CD release, Smalltalk. "Conversation in particular has this ability to change its nature when one no longer concentrates on the meaning of the words." Composed in 1988, the title track from this collection embodies the composer's sentiment quite precisely: the music is based on the contours and timbres of conversational speech, but is digitally extrapolated into ethereal clouds and waves of textures and colors, with the actual generative speech element almost completely masked.

Such ideas are something of an obsession for Lansky. His series of "chatter" pieces (beginning with Idle Chatter in 1985) sought to raise speech from language to art by snipping it into bits and jumbling them together into a musical mass; The Lesson, from 1989, masked the sounds of a former teacher's musicological lecture with an ethereal hyper-resonance. On the other hand, Smalltalk (and soon after, Late August, a similar project using Chinese rather than English speech) used computer manipulation to turn the speech into a series of musical cues so that the actual sound of the voices only occasionally comes to the surface of the musical texture.

Smalltalk was inspired by the composer's childhood memories of falling asleep during car trips; Lansky recalled that, at the last wakeful moment, the sound of his parents' conversations lost its syntactical quality and gained an abstract, musical one. Lansky sought to recreate something of this sensation in Smalltalk by recording a conversation between himself and his wife (and frequent collaborator) Hannah MacKay. The words themselves carried no great semantic import—they talked mostly about everyday domestic concerns—but, using the sophisticated computer music resources at Princeton University (where the composer studied and now teaches) and computer software he had pioneered, Lansky translated the pitch contours, timbres, and inflections of their conversation into ornate musical gestures. The speech hides within a kind of electronically softened harpsichord sound (one that is heard so frequently within Lansky's oeuvre as to be something of a calling card); Lansky's computer algorithms quantisize the ascending and descending pitches of speech into discrete units that translate into familiar musical scales and figurations. There is thus a kind of impulsive quality to the music—as the words and phrases from the original recording are interspersed with the normal conversational pauses, the musical gestures likewise take the form of sudden thoughts, then brief, deliberative silences. These gaps are filled in, however, by sustained background harmonies, which Lansky provides, he says, as "a place to let your ears rest when listening to the music of the conversation or attempting to hear the words behind it."

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