I decided to experiment with SoundCloud for posting new music. It's a great place to post works, but it's not really a blog. I like having the space to write about what I post and being able to customize my page, but Blogger doesn't allow uploading audio files, so you have to make videos, and the videos they import get compressed, so they sound like crap. The solution is to post videos on YouTube, which I've been doing, and link them to Blogger, but all that work to make a video is a pain and superfluous, since none of my content is visual. On the other hand, it's nice having an object to put in the text to mark the music, like "Here it is!" and Blogger doesn't have an equivalent object for SoundCloud. Maybe I could have a pic of a crow or something and attach the link to that. Dunno; we'll see.
In the meantime, here is a new piece: I call it "(more space)". It's a quickie and has lots of flaws -- it's barely mixed, there are several places where the gain is still to high, and the ending is clunky, just to name a few -- but I felt the need to do a piece in one sitting and get it published. Things have been pretty challenging in my little corner of the universe recently, it felt good to focus on my inner ear and just get something out into the world.
The piece is best listened to on a system with a good, clear bass; it's not bass-heavy, but its low end knits the whole thing together. It represents the sort of thing I'm most interested in doing: almost exclusively timbral in nature, minimally rhythmic, minimally melodic. Harmony (in the broadest sense of what happens when more than one pitch plays at a time) cannot be ignored, but it's not emphasized either. I find how sounds change fascinating, and I aim to produce music that draws the ear into that. I hope you find something that draws you in here.
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Heir on a G String
Looking at the DAW file, I see it was nearly a year ago when I started this. It happened one night when I was in the grocery store and thought I heard the Bach "Air" from Suite #3 (BWV 1068) playing over the store sound system -- by a 60s blues band. As I listened more carefully over the reverberating shoppers' din, I realized it wasn't uncle Johann, but Procol Harem playing what for many qualifies them as one-hit-wonders. It struck me then that their instrumentation would actually make a nice ensemble for the Bach "Air." (And, yes, PH seemed to have "inherited" from Mr. B. some especially lovely harmonic and melodic structures for their song.) Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, a short trip home allowed me to assemble the necessary virtual performers and have a go at it.
You will probably notice a number of problems with it: the expression in the organ part is uneven (at best) and I did nothing with the tempo except to put the ritardando in at the end (live musicians would have varied it slightly for expression). By the number of hours I put into it, you might expect more nuance, but, as an experiment and self-tutorial, it served its purpose and was fun to do.
There is little for me to say about it technically. I didn't do much to modify the emulators' presets (I know: "Presets are for the weak"), but my interest here was not in sound design, but in learning how to coax musical expression out of a black box. My principle avenues for this were velocity (which was the only expressive control for the guitar and bass tracks) and the "Expression" parameter on the tonewheel organ. This latter is essentially a central portion of the total volume range; it does not affect the timbre as a true swell might, thus the sense of the organ moving away and coming closer, rather than getting softer or louder as such.
So, in the end, it's down to being unwilling not to post something I put so much time into, even if it's merely the result of an exercise, rather than a small piece of my soul. Still, I hope it is enjoyable.
You will probably notice a number of problems with it: the expression in the organ part is uneven (at best) and I did nothing with the tempo except to put the ritardando in at the end (live musicians would have varied it slightly for expression). By the number of hours I put into it, you might expect more nuance, but, as an experiment and self-tutorial, it served its purpose and was fun to do.
There is little for me to say about it technically. I didn't do much to modify the emulators' presets (I know: "Presets are for the weak"), but my interest here was not in sound design, but in learning how to coax musical expression out of a black box. My principle avenues for this were velocity (which was the only expressive control for the guitar and bass tracks) and the "Expression" parameter on the tonewheel organ. This latter is essentially a central portion of the total volume range; it does not affect the timbre as a true swell might, thus the sense of the organ moving away and coming closer, rather than getting softer or louder as such.
So, in the end, it's down to being unwilling not to post something I put so much time into, even if it's merely the result of an exercise, rather than a small piece of my soul. Still, I hope it is enjoyable.
Sunday, March 10, 2013
11 Mar 2004
First: yes, it has been nearly a year since my last post, and more than that since my last new piece (which was itself a very modest effort, to say the least). Paradoxically, it's not been for lack of inspiration: I've been working on dozens of projects, some of which have fallen by the wayside, some of which have been ignored in favor of new ideas but to which I plan to return, and some of which I'm still working on. 'Twas ever thus.
The piece I'm posting today is deeply personal; I debated with myself about putting it up. In the end, I decided to go forward because I'm rather proud of it. It is the first piece I've done with any spoken part (the voice in "Cars" was synthetic). Also, the text is based on an eponymous journal entry from a particularly challenging time of my life. Using it for a piece is an idea I've had in my head for some time now; I only just noticed that the date of its fruition is (roughly) the anniversary of its source.
I initially intended to include the text as a scroll in the video, but decided that the act of reading interfered with the aural space I wanted to create. I recommend listening to the piece first, without reading the text, then, if you wish, go back and listen again with the text. It is as follows:
I am walking in a dismal bog under dark branches and an overcast sky. Next to me is a small, brown boy dressed in ragged cutoffs and a grubby red t-shirt. He carries a white plastic bucket of rotting, infected, poisonous crabs. He ladles crabs into the bog every few steps.
As we walk, I sink deeper into the muck. Eventually, the bog bottom dives down into the water and the water begins to move. I leave the boy behind and follow the stream. I am soon carried off.
The clouds clear and the trees become verdant in the sun, the air sultry. The stream is covered with tiny green petals, obscuring the water below. I fear what I cannot see, but the stream is beautiful.
I reach out an arm to stroke the water and it is seized by two unseen hands. Frightened but deliberate, I lift my arm from the water and pull up a man, gasping for air as if nearly drowned. He struggles, coughing, clinging desperately to me for a few moments. He is naked and hairless and looks as if he were made of riverbottom.
Soon, he is able to breathe normally. He tells me he has been underwater for two and a half years. He had tried to kill himself, but then refused to die. He was very frightened.
We drifted downstream together, he in my arms. As we bobbed gently in the water, the mud washed from him, revealing his pink, wrinkled flesh. Bits of him had died during his long immersion and this skin began to fall away into the stream.
The water widened. We began to see houses along the banks, a woman hanging laundry in her backyard.
I leave the reader to interpret its meaning (note the duration of the man's immersion).
Technically, I'm pleased with the result, even if it is a simple piece. It is my first experiment with recording my voice and it went better than I expected (not to say there aren't problems). Also, the realization of the piece matches closely what I heard in my head. This represents a small triumph in part because it indicates that I'm getting more facile with the technology: I typically spend a frustratingly large portion of time on a project figuring out how to do what I want (which sometimes ends in me giving up and compromising or even quitting the project). With this piece, I was able to develop the synth sound I wanted, as well as the vocal effects I had in mind, relatively quickly.
As I have several pending pieces I'm excited about, with luck (and energy) my next post will come sooner.
The piece I'm posting today is deeply personal; I debated with myself about putting it up. In the end, I decided to go forward because I'm rather proud of it. It is the first piece I've done with any spoken part (the voice in "Cars" was synthetic). Also, the text is based on an eponymous journal entry from a particularly challenging time of my life. Using it for a piece is an idea I've had in my head for some time now; I only just noticed that the date of its fruition is (roughly) the anniversary of its source.
I initially intended to include the text as a scroll in the video, but decided that the act of reading interfered with the aural space I wanted to create. I recommend listening to the piece first, without reading the text, then, if you wish, go back and listen again with the text. It is as follows:
I am walking in a dismal bog under dark branches and an overcast sky. Next to me is a small, brown boy dressed in ragged cutoffs and a grubby red t-shirt. He carries a white plastic bucket of rotting, infected, poisonous crabs. He ladles crabs into the bog every few steps.
As we walk, I sink deeper into the muck. Eventually, the bog bottom dives down into the water and the water begins to move. I leave the boy behind and follow the stream. I am soon carried off.
The clouds clear and the trees become verdant in the sun, the air sultry. The stream is covered with tiny green petals, obscuring the water below. I fear what I cannot see, but the stream is beautiful.
I reach out an arm to stroke the water and it is seized by two unseen hands. Frightened but deliberate, I lift my arm from the water and pull up a man, gasping for air as if nearly drowned. He struggles, coughing, clinging desperately to me for a few moments. He is naked and hairless and looks as if he were made of riverbottom.
Soon, he is able to breathe normally. He tells me he has been underwater for two and a half years. He had tried to kill himself, but then refused to die. He was very frightened.
We drifted downstream together, he in my arms. As we bobbed gently in the water, the mud washed from him, revealing his pink, wrinkled flesh. Bits of him had died during his long immersion and this skin began to fall away into the stream.
The water widened. We began to see houses along the banks, a woman hanging laundry in her backyard.
I leave the reader to interpret its meaning (note the duration of the man's immersion).
Technically, I'm pleased with the result, even if it is a simple piece. It is my first experiment with recording my voice and it went better than I expected (not to say there aren't problems). Also, the realization of the piece matches closely what I heard in my head. This represents a small triumph in part because it indicates that I'm getting more facile with the technology: I typically spend a frustratingly large portion of time on a project figuring out how to do what I want (which sometimes ends in me giving up and compromising or even quitting the project). With this piece, I was able to develop the synth sound I wanted, as well as the vocal effects I had in mind, relatively quickly.
As I have several pending pieces I'm excited about, with luck (and energy) my next post will come sooner.
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Everything and Nothing
"It has been too long since I've posted." This seems to be the blogger's refrain. Some of my favorite webcomics regularly -- or at least once in a while -- have posts professing the author's guilt over how long it's been since s/he has produced and shared anything substantially creative. And I take solace in that fact.
My excuse (today) is that I have so much going on. I don't mean I'm too busy, although I do have a lot on my non-blogging plate. No, I mean that I have a bunch of music projects that I've started and am working on more or less regularly, but none are ready. Not even close, actually. Still, I'm really excited about all of them: a choral arrangement (or two) that will incorporate a vocoder, a dance(ish) piece constructed almost entirely from samples of spoken phrases, a new original piece in a minimalist style, and a Tomita-esque (if I may be so bold as to compare myself to the Master) arrangement of three French impressionist piano works (no, not Debussy). I've gotten a couple of dares to do a Pink Floyd cover, too, but that's proving to be very difficult.
I'm also back to square one (okay, maybe square two) with learning my software. Along with Logic Pro, I also recently procured a copy of Arturia's Moog Modular V, which is an emulation of the kind of synthesizer that Wendy Carlos used to create Switched-On Bach and the Well-Tempered Synthesizer, to name two of its best known applications. Between the Moog emulator, the dozens of sophisticated softsynths and effects native to Logic, and Logic itself, I've got a couple of college courses worth of stuff to learn, just to be able to do what I have already envisioned. By way of comparison, after nearly a year of using Tracktion, I felt like I was only beginning to develop some facility with it. Logic's learning curve is steeper and higher -- although being more lofty, the climb should be more satisfying.
So, no music from me today. And honestly, my prime motivation for posting now is really just to keep Google from thinking this is a spam site and shutting me down, like it did once before. Consider this a keep-alive: new music is on the way, even if I don't know when it will arrive.
In the meantime, here's a lovely little something that happens to be going through my head right now:
My excuse (today) is that I have so much going on. I don't mean I'm too busy, although I do have a lot on my non-blogging plate. No, I mean that I have a bunch of music projects that I've started and am working on more or less regularly, but none are ready. Not even close, actually. Still, I'm really excited about all of them: a choral arrangement (or two) that will incorporate a vocoder, a dance(ish) piece constructed almost entirely from samples of spoken phrases, a new original piece in a minimalist style, and a Tomita-esque (if I may be so bold as to compare myself to the Master) arrangement of three French impressionist piano works (no, not Debussy). I've gotten a couple of dares to do a Pink Floyd cover, too, but that's proving to be very difficult.
I'm also back to square one (okay, maybe square two) with learning my software. Along with Logic Pro, I also recently procured a copy of Arturia's Moog Modular V, which is an emulation of the kind of synthesizer that Wendy Carlos used to create Switched-On Bach and the Well-Tempered Synthesizer, to name two of its best known applications. Between the Moog emulator, the dozens of sophisticated softsynths and effects native to Logic, and Logic itself, I've got a couple of college courses worth of stuff to learn, just to be able to do what I have already envisioned. By way of comparison, after nearly a year of using Tracktion, I felt like I was only beginning to develop some facility with it. Logic's learning curve is steeper and higher -- although being more lofty, the climb should be more satisfying.
So, no music from me today. And honestly, my prime motivation for posting now is really just to keep Google from thinking this is a spam site and shutting me down, like it did once before. Consider this a keep-alive: new music is on the way, even if I don't know when it will arrive.
In the meantime, here's a lovely little something that happens to be going through my head right now:
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
Young and the Restless
When I first heard Gyorgy Ligeti's Atmospheres, which like most people was when I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, it blew me away. Later, I learned that Ligeti wrote the piece as an answer to the question (I'm paraphrasing), "How might one write music if everything but pitch and timbre were eliminated?" I found this severe narrowing of the compositional toolkit very intriguing and even more in the when applied to the potentially vast timbral palette of electronic music. Thus, one of my goals in my current work is to explore this ground for myself.
I recently ran across Wim Merten's book on minimalism that includes overviews of the work of four composers from the 1960s and '70s, including LaMonte Young. Among other things, he was known for, on the one hand, a rather anarchical approach to music and, on the other, an abiding interest in the subtleties of sound. One piece he wrote that embodies both of these interests, and which is discussed in the book, is Composition 1960 #7. The piece consists of two notes played simultaneously, the B below middle C and the F# above it, and the instructions "to be held for a long time." As I understand it, one of the intentions of the piece is to direct the listener to the complexity of the sounds being made, without the distraction of melodic or harmonic movement. Imagine these two notes being played by a violin, for example: regardless of the skill of the violinist, the sound would subtly change with minute differences in the bow’s movement across the strings, as well as through small shifts of the player's left hand. These fluctuations in the sound would be objective, but additionally, the listener's attention can shift across violin's rich sonic structure, yielding subjective changes in perception of the timbre.
Young’s piece seemed like the perfect platform for an initial foray into the timbral vocabulary of the synthesizer -- or at least the ones I have on hand. There are only two notes in my variation, the B and the F# Young delimited, but I have doubled them several times, and I have purposefully varied the sonic playing field to a significant degree relative to that of an acoustic instrument. Given the complexity I have added to it, I suspect Young would consider my treatment of his piece to be counter to his initial intention; it is for this reason that I call it a variation on his theme, rather than an arrangement.
I invite you, nonetheless, to listen to this in much the same way as I understand Young intended his piece to be listened to: give yourself over to the sound, let it wash over you, and notice what presents itself. There is a great deal going on texturally, despite the melodic and harmonic stasis. You will very clearly hear in several places the 4th partial, D#, giving the sound a warm, major consonance. There are also two resonances that pop up fairly prominently in different places, one is a clean sine at D# and the other is a more ragged tone that includes a very high C#; both result from the electronic engines’ filters self-oscillating. And, of course, there are a great number of higher partials to chase.
I recently ran across Wim Merten's book on minimalism that includes overviews of the work of four composers from the 1960s and '70s, including LaMonte Young. Among other things, he was known for, on the one hand, a rather anarchical approach to music and, on the other, an abiding interest in the subtleties of sound. One piece he wrote that embodies both of these interests, and which is discussed in the book, is Composition 1960 #7. The piece consists of two notes played simultaneously, the B below middle C and the F# above it, and the instructions "to be held for a long time." As I understand it, one of the intentions of the piece is to direct the listener to the complexity of the sounds being made, without the distraction of melodic or harmonic movement. Imagine these two notes being played by a violin, for example: regardless of the skill of the violinist, the sound would subtly change with minute differences in the bow’s movement across the strings, as well as through small shifts of the player's left hand. These fluctuations in the sound would be objective, but additionally, the listener's attention can shift across violin's rich sonic structure, yielding subjective changes in perception of the timbre.
Young’s piece seemed like the perfect platform for an initial foray into the timbral vocabulary of the synthesizer -- or at least the ones I have on hand. There are only two notes in my variation, the B and the F# Young delimited, but I have doubled them several times, and I have purposefully varied the sonic playing field to a significant degree relative to that of an acoustic instrument. Given the complexity I have added to it, I suspect Young would consider my treatment of his piece to be counter to his initial intention; it is for this reason that I call it a variation on his theme, rather than an arrangement.
I invite you, nonetheless, to listen to this in much the same way as I understand Young intended his piece to be listened to: give yourself over to the sound, let it wash over you, and notice what presents itself. There is a great deal going on texturally, despite the melodic and harmonic stasis. You will very clearly hear in several places the 4th partial, D#, giving the sound a warm, major consonance. There are also two resonances that pop up fairly prominently in different places, one is a clean sine at D# and the other is a more ragged tone that includes a very high C#; both result from the electronic engines’ filters self-oscillating. And, of course, there are a great number of higher partials to chase.
Some technical notes for those interested: The two main engines here are Logic's ES2 and Greenoak's Crystal. The former holds two F#s with three voices one octave apart; the oscillators are a saw wave, a square wave, and a bright “wood” sampled wave, all oscillating both independently and in frequency modulation. These are collectively filtered with a 12db low-pass filter and a resonance filter controlled separately by very-low-frequency, sample-and-hold and random-wave oscillators. Crystal, holding two Bs an octave apart, is also running three voices: two saws and a synthetic voice sample. These voices are filtered independently using low-frequency oscillators and/or multi-point looping envelopes. Finally, the bottom end, a B one octave below Crystal's low B, is held down using Logic's EXS24 sampler playing a choir sample; this voice is run through a static low-pass filter just to get the color right but is otherwise left alone.
Monday, January 2, 2012
Losing Tracktion but Getting Logical
Well, thanks to some generous holiday gifts, I have been blessed with a bit of mad money and, nearly as quickly as it came, I have sent it on its merry way to fetch me a copy of Apple's premiere DAW, Logic Pro. I have read nearly everything I could find online about it and even asked some questions on the user forums (Whoohoo! I can write in 23/64 time if I want!) before deciding to take the plunge. I've been downloading chunks of the suite for an hour and a half already and it looks like there's still another two hours to go before it's all loaded. Yes, it's big.
The main parts of the program are up already though, so, by way of exploring, I opened up a GarageBand piece in it (Nine). It sounds pretty much the same, although the dynamic range seems a bit broader (I'm assuming that's artifactual and not part of the upgrade as such). Looking at the interface, I think I know what most of it does, but there is so clearly so much more going on, so many more control points and options, so much greater power and flexibility, that I now feel lost.
Tomorrow is my first day back at the counseling center and we've got lots of post-vacation catching up to do this week, so I don't expect to driving this mûmak of a program too quickly. However, I have a new piece I've been working on over vacation that seems much better suited to the depth of control that Logic provides than what was available in the three DAWs I started out on (LMMS, Tracktion, and GB), so I already have something to use it for and will definitely be diving in as soon as I can. Meanwhile, Apple has lots of tutorials to help me get my bearings. Very exciting to start the new year with a DAW that I feel like I can really grow with!
The main parts of the program are up already though, so, by way of exploring, I opened up a GarageBand piece in it (Nine). It sounds pretty much the same, although the dynamic range seems a bit broader (I'm assuming that's artifactual and not part of the upgrade as such). Looking at the interface, I think I know what most of it does, but there is so clearly so much more going on, so many more control points and options, so much greater power and flexibility, that I now feel lost.
Tomorrow is my first day back at the counseling center and we've got lots of post-vacation catching up to do this week, so I don't expect to driving this mûmak of a program too quickly. However, I have a new piece I've been working on over vacation that seems much better suited to the depth of control that Logic provides than what was available in the three DAWs I started out on (LMMS, Tracktion, and GB), so I already have something to use it for and will definitely be diving in as soon as I can. Meanwhile, Apple has lots of tutorials to help me get my bearings. Very exciting to start the new year with a DAW that I feel like I can really grow with!
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Five and Six
This piece is very special to me for several reasons. First, I have put a great deal of thought into it, which is unusual. Frequently in the past I have found that, if I think too much about what I'm writing, my music comes out dry, cerebral, and uninteresting. However, in this case, I felt like I was able to keep true to my original musical inspirations while still being able to identify in them some basic structures that I could exploit to build the piece in a way that felt relatively organic. As a consequence, “Five and Six” is more harmonically, rhythmically, and compositionally sophisticated than anything I've done so far. (This is not to say that it is especially sophisticated; I'm just a music school drop-out, after all.) At the same time, it still feels right and meaningful to me.
Another reason that this piece is significant to me is that its completion comes roughly a year after I first started exploring making synthetic music. This time last December, I had just discovered the Linux Multimedia Studio, an open source DAW written for Linux and Windows. After messing around with the program for a few weeks, I produced, in the early hours of Christmas Day, “In Three II.” The experience fanned the fires of a long-dormant passion and I have spent most of my spare time since educating myself on the current state of music synthesis (as well as its history), re-acquainting myself with music theory, and listening to as much electronic and/or minimalist music as I could find.
Not to be terribly profound about it, the music I find most compelling is that which is in some way emotionally evocative, while also being intellectually interesting. It does not have to be consonant or even tonal, but, for me, it does have to be “musical.” That is, it must speak to – invoke, require – that part of my psyche that distinguishes organized, communicative sound from random noise. “Five and Six” is the closest I've yet come to writing something that evokes an emotional state while also holding an intellectual interest.
Anyone who knows Steve Reich's work will recognize some his ideas here – indeed, my working title for the piece was “Reichspiel” – in particular his use of repeated phrases that cycle asymmetrically relative to each other. I was initially playing around with phasing, a Reichian technique where one part slowly modifies its beat relative to the other parts and so briefly goes out of phase, and this got me thinking about how different parts' time signatures might be structured to produce a phasing of phrases rather than of beats. In this case, three of the parts play in 5/4 time while the two other parts play in 6/4 time (hence the title), while the quarter-note beat is shared across all parts. Further, the number of repetitions of a given phrase varies across parts, for example, the string-like voice repeats its phrases three times, the reed-like part repeats five times, and the cycles for the marimba-like part are based on 18 repetitions. In this way, the music as a whole offers, at any given moment, a familiar anchor for the listener, while still changing constantly.
In order to give some structure to what would otherwise be a free-for-all, I developed all the horizontal components within a relatively simple vertical structure. Working in g minor, I used as my guide to writing all harmony only the i7, v, v7, VI, and VI7 chords, which essentially sum to a major 11th chord based on B♭. Being a string player by training, vertical structure was never my strong point, so taking a simplistic approach like this allowed me to create a warm, consonant, yet colored sonic substrate over which the four inherently linear voices might interact. Too, it gave me some guidelines for how to write the linear parts so that they wouldn't clash. (Not that I don't like strongly chromatic, or even atonal, music; I'm just not facile enough with the rules of tonality to break them in musically meaningful ways.)
As always, I invite your thoughts on this: please comment and let me know what you liked or didn't like! (Including demands that I take back my trashing of Philip Glass, given the last phrases of this piece!)
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