Two months before I began working on this piece, my daughter Inga was born.  I became fascinated by the question: What is she experiencing now?  I noticed that she could become absorbed by things that I would not even have noticed, and I tried to imagine how she perceived sensory impressions.

She heard an ever-changing stream of sounds without seeing what had caused them.  She got transported about without knowing it, and woke suddenly, in a new place, met by sounds that she had never heard the likes of.  For a person without references, associations, and previous experiences, the concrete sounds of the everyday world must be totally abstract - disconnected from cause, effect, and function.

What did she focus her attention on in a cacophony of strange, new sounds?  What did she perceive as foreground and background in the total sound picture?  How did the world of sound get transformed by her imagination?

These thoughts and questions form the basis for this piece.  The raw material consists of recordings done by 3 youths from Oslo who participated in a project called "Breaking the Sound Barrier" in 1996.  I asked them to record sounds from their local environments, as well as  church bells.  In some cases, I have processed the sounds so drastically that they have totally changed character and new, unfamiliar sounds have been created.  In other cases, the sounds are used in their original form, but are placed in unusual juxtapositions with other sounds.  I have also tried to create soundscapes which could almost have been real.

"Baby Carriage Fantasy" was commissioned by the Ultima International Festival of Contemporary Music and first performed in the Oslo Concert Hall on 20. October, 1996. The piece was created on my home computer using software from the Composers' Desktop Project, and mixed at NOTAM with Øyvind Hammer's MIX program.