I was competely awed with the ability to use quadraphonic surround sound on Logic and it made me wonder why it hasn’t cuaght on and replaced stereo as the standard. In our performance we designated each of the four parts to each of the four(quadra) speakers with a few effects to exploit the abilities of moving sound around. The way of converting the audio tracks to surround sound instead of stereo is by selecting surround in the bus button where is by default says ‘outputs 1 and 2′. Also you have to change the surround setting in audio preferences to quadraphonic to work with the speaker set ups you have. At the beginning Jason’s part which is a distorted swell moves forward across the room and Matt’s sample of Julio saying ‘I need more recordings’ swirls around the soundscape. It was a great experience working with sound in a 3 dimensional context because it makes you think about sound in terms of space aswell as frequency distribution. There are a few moments in the piece where a sound will swirl around the room but they are used as performatives to show when the sound is excited in frequency, it excites around the room.
The feeling of sound spatialisation is also riveting for the fact that it dominates the sound space around you and you feel like you are inside the sound, much similar to the way in which composers and producers often say they think of mixing in 3D terms, you actually experience it. Also the sounds are not establishing texture as much as they are space. The experiences I have walking home in which I get utterly lost in the sounds around me also could be emulated with this technique. Dolby Surround is often used in Cinema but the Speakers are placed so far away you do not become truly involved, only marvelling when a car seems to go behind you.
I also find with much music that the process of composition is unilateral, the music travels forward as it is played that way, much like you read something, but with spatialisation techniques and sound travelling slowly at a pace, a sudden reversing of the audio files and reversing of panning could involve the listener much more deeply.
With the surround panner there is a circle with figurative speakers placed 90 degrees away from each other, and the centre of sound as is moved about in the space. It is clearly a more sophisticated way of choosing volume for each speaker as the placement you choose has dimension and angle. With a dimension of 1 it is most sever in panning and of 0 it will be dead centre, equal volume of all channels. Many hifalutin ideas from composers are born of dreams of spatialisation, primarily concerned with the inevitiably impossible notion of makig music physical and tangible. I thought only severe volume and subbass could really become physical but now I am starting to think in the terms of sounds as objects. For my main project I wish you create something in which the listener is also the active composer and their movements dictate the variables in composing their personal piece. Pete Townshend’s computer programme The Lifehouse Project based on his discarded concept for their album Who’s Next generated personal songs composed using algorythmic techniques which could convert pictures into music. I want to create something in which movement creates music, maybe recognising heart beats and using that as a pulse. Quite an ambition, needless to say I’ve enjoyed the Ixi Quarks improvisations.
In this piece to pad out the mix I added a synth bass part playing with perfect 4ths and 5ths to make it sound fuller. Also to emulate the sound of Aphex Twin I used similar synth sounds and modified them to have a close affinity as possible with the sounds he uses. I used string parts similar to the ones I have heard on his track fingerbib. The introductory sound is a squeaky chair I recorded in Hel-40 and I used the clicks at the end to form a beat out of it akin to the bass and ball combination in bucephalus bouncing ball. In the solo part I played the sample unedited twice to establish the rhythm then played it with a sped up version, recorded using the varispeed function to make it phase. I then reversed the sample and heavily reverbed it and faded it into the last section of the sample. I then took the last 8th region of the sample and repeated it, using distortion and pitch effects to make it juicier. Then I automated a pitch shifter insert to raise an octave during the duration of each kick. The last section is formed from repeated snippets of the sample, repeating so fast that they create pitch.
This is the first attempt at my Electronica song for Fundamentals of Electronic Music. I recorded the sound of a particularly squeaky chair in Hel-45 after our lesson on thursday and I’ve exploited the rhythmic clicks at the end. As it stands I clearly need more modulation with the sample sound but I got carried away trying to get the ‘sound’ of Aphex Twin. I always thought emulating other artists purposefully nixes creativity but this exercise has been fun. Anyway here goes.
Miles Davis has always to me been a musician to earmark and return to when I’m ready to absorb the complexities cohesively, or at least posess a sufficient musical vocabulary to understand the processes involved. It’s something I’ve always averted on the naieve notion that creativity takes care of itself and digests things like a snake would a larger animal. At first it engorges the snakes body and it’s distended stomach makes leaves it cumbersome, abnormal and slow. But in the digestive process the snake grows substantially and becomes a more pernicious predator, or at least seems so at a zoo. Anyway, from loaning some Miles Davis CDs from the library and watching some interviews on the youtube, my guitar playing (although exclusively bedroom noodlings) is beginning to take a better shape at the moment. I also like the fact that he stresses the importance of studying music without sounding sterile or professorial, could just be the piebald jacket he’s wearing though.
Another thing that’s great about Miles is his fertile evolution, born not of dissatisfaction with previous works or a singular goal, but his inspiring need to create. In one interview he said “…if I’m not creating anything I might aswell be dead”. Another virtue of his is that although he praised Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker frequently, he didn’t wince at new music but embraced it, which everybody should do.
This piece is from the dizzying film Waking Life and is composed by Glover Gill of the ‘nuevo tango’ genre. A great and catchy composition.
This is a first draft of my Elektronische Music piece. There’s some techniques that have been omitted from it which will be included as soon as I can figure them out. It’s impetus was Gesang Der Junglinge yet there is a bit ‘o’ transposition, reversing and inversion at the end using sounds from the 8 bit plug in Matt showed us. I used the midi transform function to do these techniques. Also at the end after seeing Stockhausen’s spatialisation techniques I did a crude version of this by automating a gradual pan. I don’t have as many output channels to emulate the effect he uses so it’s a simple left to right process.
If you are Julio reading this could you possibly give me feedback?
at the top if you look at the Pdef(\drums, you can see that I used a Prand on \chan to use random alternation between three different drum channels. One is IDM Kit 2, 2nd is Cavern Kit and the 3rd is Indie Kit. I also used a Prand on \db to give it a dtronger sense of dynamics, it works especially well when a midinote from the Cavern kit is played as the thick reverb makes it sound far away I suppose.
The last section which reminds me of Vernon Elliot(the man who scored all of Noggin the Nog, The Clangers, Bagpuss and Ivor the Engine) , was attained by a \ctranspose functionwhich raises the second note a semitone and the third a whole tone. It works surprisingly well I think and changes the scale. I also transposed it up a 4th and changed the \dur values to make it more relaxed.
I put some tremolo on the flutes to make them sound a little less flutey. I know the instrumentation is pretty standard but I think it is an effective piece.
It’s finally done and done and done.I used various sounds and realised you can make a source sound inscrutable byt chagining th pitch using varispeed. For accuracy’s sake I added a vinyl crackle sound to each track, each synchronised to the size of the samples used to emulate the ryhtmic crackle heard on Etudes aux Chemins de Fe by the technique he’s using. I’ve officially been using Logic enough to have my dreams predicated on chopping bits up and varispeed nightmares. The same happened when I played too much Super Mario Galaxy even though I don’t agree there is too much. There was a psychological study where they tested it out. And quote;
“Science uses a process of experiment and proof. Yet the study of dreams is extremely problematic. Stickgold mentions this. “Put ten dream analysts into a room and they will come up with ten answers”. Yet Stickgold believes that he has magically managed to interpret dreams himself. Yes he has managed to get several people to dream the same dream. He managed to get several people to have virtually the same dream. He set up groups of participants to learn the puzzle game Tetris. Many had dreams of Tetris squares falling. He concluded that the study helped show how the dream mind helps us to learn and integrate new information. We do not improve playing Tetris unless we go to sleep. Groups did not improve as the day went on. When they slept and played the game the next day though they improved. Dreams then help us integrate new information. They help us formulate new rules and to analyze the game in detail. We make connections and we form insights.“
Pretty badass, I should be a logic whizz if I maintain this hermetic existence, seeing disclosure triangles in wood patterns and a varispeed meter running when people’s talking speeds up out of excitement. Then I’ll have a USB drive installed in my cranium. It’ll be just like the Matrix except I won’t learn fighting skills, just sequencing skills and .pdfs of the history of Cambridge’s churches to hobnob with the intelligentsia.
Listen everybody
and here is the original fungineer himself, Pierre Schaeffer
This is long winded and very self indulgent so if you want to, just watch the videos. They say a lot more than I can.
As a Radiohead-head I’ve seen them live 3 times now and been awed every time, but the first gig was the most memorable. It was possibly the luckiest summer I could have had. I met a cool guy called Michael on holiday in France when I was either 12 or 13 when I was honing kickflips, nollie heelflips and grinding on public property(the ceramic steps of the campsite toilets this time), and he was interested in the skateboarding. I’m pretty sure he had his own but I taught him how to olly. In skateboarding it’s the equivalent of playing the riff from smoke on the water properly with the 5ths and all. After few years without contact he got back in touch with me by searching my name on google and finding my website at the time with ‘funny’ videos on it. We continued talking and discovered our tastes in music were complimentary and I must say he’s partly responsible for my eclectic proclivities now.
Out of the blue one day he told me he had a spare ticket to see Radiohead in Ireland, gratis no less. After this I went to stay with him for a few days and had an incredible time, surfing, skating near an abandoned building entitled ‘the asbestos house’ or something like that. On the final day I went to see Radiohead and on the way discovered Beck was supporting. Chuffed. Another band who I’d briefly checked out called Deerhoof were the first supporting act. My socks were swiftly blown off. They were and still are the tightest band I’ve ever seen. But the drummer Greg Saunier who also contributes songs, was playing this intensely controlled chaos. With only a kick, snare and hi-hat he, managed to get more sounds than any of Steve Vai’s virtuoso backing drummers. The guitarist was swish too. Intriguing melodies and moving chord sequences that didn’t balance intellectual stimulation and emotional significance, but synergised the two. Unfortunately I didn’t realise this so much at the time, given the poor mixing from the wind and sound guy.
I accidentally bought one of their albums last year called Offend Maggie, their latest. Another band called Deerhoof I’d recently got into and in HMV there was an album with Deerh(price sticker) on the cover. It’s a great great album. The closer is my new favourite song. Complex ideas expressed simply. The opening chord sequence is made of 3 note arpeggios and while that descends, the vocal line is transposed one semi tone it’s second time. Well, I’ve probably already played it up too much but here it is
Here’s what the drummer has to say about creativity aswell
Group 1′s piece was very interesting or it’s structure. The first incarnation of their song I heard while we were sharing Hel-40 and they had sum phatt b3ats going with dubby wowowoms going in and out. They abandoned that for an atmospheric swishabout premise, with some sonic sounds coming in and out, like little monkeys. I heard them confabbing before they started and it seemed they went clockwise round the table to take it in turns. The knowledge I gleaned from their performance was call and response, it wasn’t glued with any rhythm but glued by a system. Bitchin’ stuff.
The group I was in miraculously got our rhythms to sync up this time and fostered a process music theme. Me and Fred were both using scratch sampler with the grain squares and had our grain densitys at 0.5. This is useful because it allows you to highlight squares of pitch used by the beep tones of our sample (talking clock) by highlighting pitch values relative to the y axis, and also helps develop a melody. With some new discoveries in Ixi Quarks we can add more interest. Bitchin’ stuff.
Group 3 had used a process music theme similar to ours. Mariana near the end had an almost dissonant cluster of notes playing together which was very appealing. It faded out very well also as she removed certain notes each bar and left it with a single tone establishing a rhythm. They had more ideas going at once but hadn’t quite managed to cohere them all, with that I think it could be very successful.
Group 4′s piece started off quite diffuse and then clippets of drum loop samples were rhythmically dropped in, eventually loping without breaks. There was a pulsing root note I think Ollie was playing which the others played around with. There were probably a few too many bum notes played in quite a shrill register which only exacerbated it. Some little hoover sounds played in which could’ve been more rhythmic as the drum loop.
Group 5′s most interesting aspect which threw me off predicting te rest was the decelerating drum loop. At first I thought it’d be some high speed tune but it wasn’t so. As the beat slowed down the other group members were clearly following the master drummer. It was ok.
