Composition Two.

This composition i made stems from a short while ago when i began thinking about how the voice is such a beautiful sampler in itself. Think of a way to say something and you can automatically say, reverse it, say it quicker, slow it down etc etc. I thought that prehaps for my acousmatic work it would be intersting to do a piece entirley using phonomes making up the word “acousmatic”. SO enlisting the help of my girlfrend i set about recording all the different ways we could think of saying the letters in the word. Once this was done i then made a sampler instrument for each letter in logic, enabling me to use them as chords etc. I am very interested in the German musical writing style of “Klangfarbenmelodie”. This is the playing of a single melodic line, but each note is played through different instruments so as to create a rich tone colour and ultimatley a more interesting aural experience. With my smapler instruments made i set about thinking about the structure that would take hold of the piece. This would be very important, as the structure of phonomes in words is the very essence that creates them in the first place. i wanted to begin with the simple sounds, the straght samples as they were, to give the listener some direction in his listening approach. The sounds then begin to jumble and transform into sound that you would no longer consider to be that of the human voice, and especially that of phonoems. I have not worked with the voice in this way before, and now i surly will again. lovely harmony’s can be created when playing chords and choppy rhythems can be created by cutting the sample on a noticable bit of the wave form. I played all the samples in on my fatastic midi controller, my Akai MPK 49. This has the classic Akai MPC drum pads on it, but it is only a controller. These make for very intuitive playing and creating odd structures. The keyboard also has an arpeggiator on it , with buttons for different timings and a latch. The latch feature enabled me to control, in realtime, the cutoff and resonance values in the sampleer instrument, which is great for getting some “FM”  type sounds. that is how they were created in the piece. After doing the midi work , i then set about incorporating the orignal samples in again and serquencing them as i normally would. Mixing these two different audio control styles has been an interesting and ultimatly creative excersise. There is little use of effects in logic, the only ones being spacedesigner on bus one(which is bused to all the channesl) and a very fun unit called supertrigger. This chops up the audio on the track at random, however you do have control over certain parameters.The piece finishes with a “yeah”sound, this is the reversed “AAh” phonome sound,ad i thought it was a great way to end the piece.

COMPOSITION ONE.
For my first composition wanted to use only one sample, to force me to work harder and to be more creative with my skills.i find that if you set yourself a single sound, your mind can take it to all kinds of places that you would never even consider if you had a vast array of sound bytes. Instead of always thinking about what the next sound could do and how much cooler it is going to be, work with just one sound and explore. I find that is the best method for me to work in. The sound i chose to use was a sample i made of me pulling the vinyl cover of my guitar amplifier. I turned the gain on the microphone right up and had it on a stand very close so as to capture the raw and sound of the cover scratching around on the amplifier.

Once i had this i let it sit for a while, i find that if you come back to a sample a little while later you can have fresh and different ideas for it than when you first made the recording.

After a chat and a podcast with my lecturer, Julio D’Escrivan, about working in the industry and having to churn out work to make any money, i decided to be less precious about my work and view it as if i only had an hour to do the rough structure and sounds manipulations. this worked really well as i had to get to class in an hour, so forty five minutes later i had the forced structure of my piece. I have, however been back to the original structure and changed it greatly so that it is very dynamic and bolshy.I dragged the sample every way i could through ixi quiarks, discovering all kings of intersting characters inside my sound.  I am very interested in how sound makes the body feel , not emotionally, but physically. For example, the ringing you get in your ears after a loud concert, the high pitched ear-tingling sensation when you listen to frequencies just on the edge of hearing and of course, trembling bass. I wanted to have lots of this in my finished piece to really shake the listener. however, there is a fine line between overloading everything with so much bass that nothing else can be heard and balancing the high’s an low’s to achieve sonic harmony! I used the multi pressor in logic on the out-put track of my mix to bump up the bottom end after i had eq’d the out-put so as not to encounter any problems that i have previuosly mentioned. This with an adaptive limiter gave the whole piece ten times more crunch, without a lack in quality than anything else i could think of. The piece itself was intended to begin with the original sample and then slowly destroy it, with as much clout as possible. There are some wonderful thuds and crashes that really hit you hard. i found a good way to do this was to add hard reveb to the end of a thud sound and then drop it away immediatelty. Then right away bring it upagain and you get an awsome “vacume” type effect. This technique must also be mimicked by the volume automation. I made sure there was enough silence in the piece as i think sometimes when listening to acousmatic compositions, there is too little silence. These pauses give certain sounds the own time to shine and to truly hold their own amidst the chaos of a piece such as this. As quickly as the pice begins, it ends, very tight and hard ending i might add. This was intentional as i am thinking of coming back to the piece at some time in the future. i like to think of it as a thriller/cliffhanger type piece, you feel as though you want more.(well i know i do).