Simon Scott ::: :: :

http://soundcloud.com/scott-simons/moomers-29

What your objective was in creating the music for your task.

My objective for this task was to create a piece that was based around a tonic played on a sitar with slowly shifting ambient cloud masses that use distortion glitches as rough sound textures. Reference points are the microsound composer Kim Cascone’s “subliminal pulsations” (Demers, 2010, p.16) Phil Niblock’s drones and the dense granular sound masses of Christian Fennesz.

What well known composer’s approach you decided to adopt and how you modified it to suit your piece. Or, if you feel your approach is original, then explain what makes it so.

I adopted an approach that, despite sounds not at all similar to thier skipping CD malfunctions, mirrors how Oval would approach music where failure of technology would create hidden sounds that can be organised into loops or melodic segments to form into a composition. I took the sitar recording from Logic Pro 8 software and used an object in MaxMSP to overdrive the signal and re-recorded it and added that into the patch. Then this re-recorded patch is over driven and recorded again until the sitar pattern is broken and reformed into a new pattern of notes. With the process of re-recording Alvin Lucier’s composition I am sitting in a room (1970) has been an influence alongside the “investigation of failure” (Cox & Warner, 2007, p.394) by Oval on their album 94Diskont (1994). I was concious not to use skipping CD’s or glitches as abrasive sounds.

The female voices, taken from a recording session I made with a singer in March, I pitch shifted up three semi-tones to match the key of the sitar and added reverb and some spectral gate modulation.

Note one particular audio technique you applied in this task which you had not applied before.

The piece builds up to a climax that involves manipulating a thumb piano, recorded on an Edirol R-09 HR, and I wanted to make a drone piece that had an aggression. The audio technique I used was triple tracking this recording to add weight to the punch of each pluck. This was then put into a Max object called a waveform~ that can be used to view or edit the contents of a buffer object to loop tiny details.

In your view, how is this task an example of practice as research?

This task is an example of practice as research as it reflects the aesthetics of using technology to reveal hidden musical patterns. MaxMSP is a tool that allows the user to define and manipulate information through repetition to create glitches that can be composed into warm tones (with the addition of further audio manipulation in Logic Pro 80). I practiced the dissolving original musical form via re-recording to degrade the sitar. This reveals technological imperfections I arranged to form a composition that builds into a finale that is both microsound and drone.

Autoevaluation: what mark would you give yourself for this task and why.

I would give myself 73% as it is an aggressive sounding piece of drone music that has subtle changes with a climax that is unpredictable and interesting timbres using digital distortion (from Max) to change the original instruments entirely.

Bibliography

Demers, J., 2010, Listening Through The Noise: The Aesthetics Of Experimental Electronic Music. New York: Oxford University Press.

Cox C &D Warner (eds), 2004, Audio Culture; Readings In Modern Music, Kim Cascone: The Aesthetics Of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music, London: Continuum.

Lucier, A.. (1970) I Am Sitting In A Room. New York: Lovely Music CD.

Oval, 1995. 94Diskont. Mille Plateaux CD.

http://soundcloud.com/scott-simons/moomers-29

http://soundcloud.com/scott-simons/gama

What your objective was in creating the music for your task.

My objective for this task was to create a piece that was inspired by the movies of film director David Lynch (b.1946). In a sense I wanted to achieve a dark sound design, a sound track, track that had foley (filed recordings), compositional tension and a dark atmosphere similar to some of Ry Cooder’s work for the movie Paris, Texas (1984). Luc Ferrari (1925 -2005) condenses a day from his holiday into one flowing composition on Presque Rien No.1 (1995) and I wanted to use this idea of condensing a day as a narrative for the piece without it being an environmental soundscape. I did some field recordings around the rooms in the university Helmore building at Anglia Ruskin to create room tones to use and found a gamelan that I extensively sampled. These gamelan samples were separated into pieces that I manipulated with a light sensor to pitch shift them whilst controlling reverb and delay.

What well known composer’s approach you decided to adopt and how you modified it to suit your piece. Or, if you feel your approach is original, then explain what makes it so.

I am fully aware of the film soundtrack work Angelo Badalamenti (b.1937) has produced for Lynch but his work didn’t influence any particular approach I adopted for this task. I would say that the sampling of my vinyl, that took various classical and jazz music instruments, was inspired simply to get the piece built up into a full composition. Philip Jeck (b.1952) uses old vinyl to create his compositions so he was an influence, in particular the CD Sand (2008). There are strings and percussive loops over my gamalan manipulations (background textures) that came from another film composer Leszek Jankowski (b.1956), who scored music for the directors Stephen and Timothy Quay (b.1947) (The Quay Brothers).

Note one particular audio technique you applied in this task which you had not applied before.

I have never used a gamelan before and never used an LDR to control sound so these two combined created new and interesting results. The pitch shifted gamelan went down into a low pitch at such a slow speed it sounded like heavy marbles rubbing together to create an incredibly rich texture that I wanted to use as the backdrop for the piece. This inspired me to develop the piece as an imaginary film soundtrack and the samples fulfilled that approach alongside the experiments with my sensors connected to my Arduino microprocessor.

In your view, how is this task an example of practice as research?

This task is an example of practice as research as it explores the cinematic soundtrack qualities of some of my favourite pieces composed for David Lynch films, such as Silencio from Mulholland Drive (2001). It creates unusual compositional spaces and musical textures that flow but unsettle from the use minor keys and sparse arrangements. Musical examples of this are the gamelan samples that create an ominous cloud of sound with occasional dry samples that appear through the haze of sound. I used a pitch shifted piano to create bass notes for the vinyl samples to sit on and realise the piece. It is also an exploration of sound and space as I wanted to keep it open without too much chaos or complication in the arrangement to keep the tension present throughout.

Autoevaluation: what mark would you give yourself for this task and why.

I would give myself 78% as the piece took almost two months to complete as I had to build my gamelan Arduino sampler entirely after collecting my recordings. I feel it would make an excellent sound track and is arranged with great attention to detail to stop itself from losing the evolution of the piece by becoming too busy in arrangement.

http://soundcloud.com/scott-simons/gama

Bibliography

Paris, Texas. 1984. Wenders, W., US: Criterion.

Ferrari, L.,1995. Presque Rien No.1. Paris: INA CD.

Jeck, P., (2008) Sand. London: Touch Music CD.

Mulholland Drive. 2001. Lynch, D., US: Universal Pictures.

Angelo Badalamenti, 2003, Silencio. Milan CD.

Again another great lesson and one I personally enjoyed as I am fascinated with the way that listening to music as a whole entity, rather than as separate sound sources (here is a cello part over the modal guitar drone in the pitch of A with a female vocal singing over the top, etc), can lead your imagination into places that are deeply personal and perhaps stimulate imaginative associations connected to memory.

1. what your objective was in creating the music for your task.

* To use a sound source that was not revealed during my piece and one that was listened to as an acousmatic soundscape. I was reading a publication by R. Murray Schafer called The tuning Of The World from 1977 that mentions his desire to record in the wilderness and transmit the soundscape into urban dwellers lives via “Environmental radio” (Schafer, 1977, 236). I also connected the acousmatic association of not being able to see the sound source to radio broadcasting so therefore decided to create a piece using the radio, already an acousmatic method for transmission of sound.

2. what well known composer’s approach you decided to adopt and how you modified it to suit your piece. Or, if you feel your approach is original, then explain what makes it so.

* I didn’t directly adopt another other composers method but I was reading a John Cage book that mentions how all sound can be music so I began to record outside and found that a distorted radio at the bottom of my garden reminded me of how Brian Eno heard a record playing so quietly that it inspired him to compose ambient music. My piece isn’t ambient but does feature ambient sounds such as passing traffic and the environment of my garden. Bernard Parmegiani uses both nautral and synthetic sounds to produce outstanding acousmatic music and I was inspired to this to use indicators of everyday existance but without any direct reference to those sounds.

3. Note one particular audio technique you applied in this task which you had not applied before.

* I recorded myself listening to the piece in MaxMSP and filtered this sound back into the work (this becomes prominent at around 0.29- 0.37 seconds). Therefore the piece you hear is recorded in MaxMSP but has little sound synthesis except some loop playback manipulation as i am recording myself listening to the piece. I am going to attempt to expand on this as it has a little bit of influence by Alvin Lucier to it.

4. Note one particular music technique you learned through doing this task.

*Using a natural soundscape for musical material with no added instrumentation. I usually filter out the wind noise too but I eq’d my piece so the wind acted as another sound that is quite dominant (prominent at 0.59) to pull the listeners ear into it and away from the radio sounds.

*5. In your view, how is this task an example of practice as research?

*Using the voice of a radio presenter and shaping an overall texture of sound that distorts the specific sound of the voice by finding a place on the dial of the radio that lost the words and semantics of the sound source. I also recorded it from a distance outside so could use the environment to transform what was actually on the radio. The actual listening process was a good example as I spent some time locating a position where to record that eradicates any obvious sound source. The additional re-recording in Max helped to dissolve any prominent bird song or passing cars too.

6. Autoevaluation: what mark would you give yourself for this task and why.

69%

I think this piece works in reference to the original meaning of the word that you hear the sound without seeing the source of it. Radio does this and therefore I experimented with this medium and disguising the source of sound as Pythagoras did when he delivered his lectures to his students.

Here is the track:  http://soundcloud.com/scott-simons/acousmatic-task

Bibliography

Schafer R, 1977, The Tuning Of The World, Destiny, Vermont, USA

Week 5: A really interesting lesson that discussed the evolution of computer music with some sound clips I’d never heard before Trevor Wishart tracks that led me to go on to discover who else was working at York University. Jonty Harrisson, who is the director of BEAST, I have been enjoying  a lot as I love the way his acousmatic pieces mix the concrete sounds with acoumatic soundscapes.

The Trevor Wishart reading of Audible Design (chapter six) was a good regarding techniques that deal with composition of digital audio lead into the grains lesson. I also watched the Curtis Roads Point Line Cloud (Asphodel, 2004) DVD and listened to the CD that was perhaps too busy for my personal and subjective musical taste but was interesting to hear just how deep one can go so deep into sound properties. I like the high tempo in many tracks but felt they had too much activity, too many quick cuts and although it reminded me a little of Ryoji Ikeda, who uses microscopic sound with repetition (of both visual and aural) very well. I feel Roads would benefit from some loops or repetition to give the listener time to digest the profound detail within his compositions. When I use Max/MSP to use grains to compose I use a wave table and experiment with the Gabor patches in the Extras Folder, such as stretch, stitch and stumble, and I use these microsounds to create loops that I can sample, re-use and shift in sound and shape but altering each new sample so they evolve into sound clouds. I also recently used the itable object to draw grains of sound and am thinking that this may be a something to develop for one of my final pieces.

I think it is important to learn about the development of software and how we have reached this point in 2011 where the technology is cheap, quick and had an intuitive interface to navigate. Xennakis’ Stochastic techniques I must admit seemed a little extreme for me as maths isn’t a fascination of mine. It does make sense that Roads took his ideas a step further. You can also hear and understand how Autechre have taken microsound as huge a influence to create their work. That admiration resulted in asking Roads to join them at a festival called All Tomorrows Parties in 2003 along with Jim O’Rourke who occasionally uses Max/MSP, Florian Hecker who is a keen user of the SuperCollider language and Bernard Parmegiani.

Bibliography

Roads C, 2004, Point Line Cloud, asphodel,

This was a lesson I enjoyed as it was an area I knew nothing about. The task was a challenge as I had never created sound poetry but the inventive use of language I discovered through listening to Charles Amirkhanian’s radio program was informative and I can see how the use of language was an integral part of the dadaist and futurist movements.

1. what your objective was in creating the music for your task.

*To use speech and phonem’s to create a sound poem that dissolved semantics but kept a meaning. In this case I decided to use a Joy Division interview from their early days and capture that spirit that a young has when a band begins it’s ascent. It is also a tribute to Ian Curtis who hung himself due to the later pressures of the industry. This is why I chose those phrases that focus on a+r men, their early aspirations “to be the new Beatles” (BBC Sessions, 2001, Interview with Stephen Morris and Ian Curtis) and include a shared joke about the train up to Manchester from London.

2. what well known composer’s approach you decided to adopt and how you modified it to suit your piece. Or, if you feel your approach is original, then explain what makes it so. Please reference the films on DVD as shown in the ARU Harvard referencing style.

*Initially I was inspired by the “Geek” piece by that inspired me to chop up separate voices and create a piece that showed how cooking on television was a manipulation of words and how they sound when mixed with innuendo. I then listened to “Blue Tuplips” by Trevor Wishart and realised that a simple sound source can be digitally manipulated and granulated so by using pitch shifting, delays, reverse and other techniques in MaxMsp I changed direction. This Joy Division sound poem was edited in Logic simply buy mixing together three versions I made that mix well together due to timbre and dynamics.

3. Note one particular audio technique you applied in this task which you had not applied before.

*Just using voices to compose was new to me. It was tricky as it was hard to extract exactly what I wanted so a lot of improvising was done in MaxMSP with pitch, editing and micro-loops (wave tables). I chose the best three takes that amplify the reasons I have already mentioned why I used this as my initial sound source.

4. Note one particular music technique you learned through doing this task.

Taking phonem’s and looping them to create a pitch shifted backdrop to the voices I mixed higher in the piece. These loops are more to the fore as the piece progresses. This task affected me quite profoundly as I began to realise just how much music I admired that used the voice as main instrument such as Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting In A Room”, Steve Reich “Come Out” and It’s Gonna Rain” and many more including Cage, Ono and Pierre Schaeffer.

*5. In your view, how is this task an example of practice as research?

*Listening to Sten Hanson, Trevor Wishart, Bruce Neuman, Joseph Beuys, Marinetti (Futurist) and Karl Schwitters (Dada) was inspiration to explore the voice as sound source. I took many television chefs voices and made a montage as I felt they took the meaning of language to another place when describing cooking techniques and ingredients. Perhaps I felt the manipulation of language, for example Nigella Lawson creating “sexy cooking”, was a manipulation of words. However this idea wasn’t how I wanted it to sound when I put it together so I realised just how hard this task was as I initially thought it would be simple.

6. Autoevaluation: what mark would you give yourself for this task and why.

66%

Here is the track:  http://soundcloud.com/scott-simons/sound-poetry-task-3

Bibliography

Joy Division, BBC Sessions CD, 2001, Interview with Stephen Morris and Ian Curtis

Alvin Lucier, I am sitting In A Room, Lovely Music, 1971

I really enjoyed the lesson this week as the late 1950′s and 1960′s are fascinating to me and the explosion of possibilities of what that post war baby boom period represented makes it a vital decade for many reasons. The fact that I was born a decade after is probably why I am drawn to it and throughout my life and I have been a fan of the fashion, the music, technological developments and the way this period offered a young generation a voice and opportunity to make things better.

I am already a fan of Eliane Radigue as a composer and I found out about her work with Pierre Henry in The Wire magazine as they ran an article all about her a year or so back. I love the way she takes her time to move between segments that flow together without any perceivable join and shifts the listeners focus slowly into another head space. I think for a while she embraced buddhism so her work has a blissful ambient listening vibe without every veering off into “new age” chimes and chants territory. There is a whole generation of contemporary electroacoustic composer’s and label owners who owe her a great deal of acknowledgement as far as I am concerned including Taylor Deupree who runs NYC’s 12k (www.12k.com), Lawrence English’s Room40 Australian label (http://room40.org/site/), some of the work on Richard Chartier’s Line label (www.lineimprint.com) and also John Twells Type record label (www.typerecords.com). Here is a link to listen and buy some of her material and hear the labels mentioned: www.boomkat.com

The San Francisco Tape Center is a vital part of the jigsaw and I discovered it by reading the Bernstein book in the library called The San Francisco Tape Music Center :1960s counterculture and the avant-garde. It has a nice dvd and it was the first time I had encountered the work of Ramon Sender and watched Pauline Oliveros using her accordian to control MaxMSP.

There is a very clear thread of technological development around this time as Don Buchla’s Buchla Box, creatively used by Subotnick in Silver Apples Of The Moon in 1968, was superseded by the ARP and the Mini Moog. The prices began to drop over the following decade allowing musicians to afford and embrace the syhnthesizer alongside the guitar.

Buchla_100

I was ill so I unfortunately missed this second class but after reading up on what I had missed and listening to the music noted on the VLE I felt I was able to approach the task of creating a ‘Young Persons Guide To Electronic Music’ for the 1950′s in the appropriate manner.

1. what your objective was in creating the music for your task.

*I wanted to compose a piece of music that uses the electronic sounds that were available at that time in the late 1950′s and early 1960′s. I found the verbalisation ideas I heard in Tuesday’s class too literal for a piece and all the musical elements to work together. Babbit wrote ‘Philomel’ in 1963 after The RCA II was installed at The Columbia Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1957 and this piece was an inspiration as the techniques flow and there is a diverse rage of oscillations and modulations.

The RCA II, also known as Victor, would have provided a composer with the new ability to sequence on a synthesizer that can allow one to loop to create rhythm whilst using oscillators so I wanted to compose using a sine, square, saw and triangle wave with white noise, filters, a ring modulator and some simple sequencing. To these I added a reversed flute and a piano with echo.

2. what well known composer’s approach you decided to adopt and how you modified it to suit your piece. Or, if you feel your approach is original, then explain what makes it so. Please reference the films on DVD as shown in the ARU Harvard referencing style.

*I am naturally drawn towards Varese (1883-1965) as he was a composer searching for new timbres to fulfil his musical desires. He called his work “organized sound” (Holmes 2002, pg 132), rather than compositions, and Varese knew that he wanted more than the traditional instrumentation that was at his disposal during his early career in the 1920′s and 30′s. So I wanted to embrace this spirit of freedom that he began to experience when the Synthesizers became available in the late 1950′s. I also wanted to let my organized sounds, including some concrete recordings, flow from one to another over the three minutes in keeping with his approach to the movement of his sculpted sound in the space of The Phillips Pavilion. After listening to ‘Poeme Electronique’ (1958) the use of real sounds that are filtered (I use high pass on the voice of my parents) is a clear example of electronic manipulation on concrete sound working well alongside synthesized sound. The mixture of acoustic instrumentation that is also electronically manipulated creates a compelling juxtaposition of synthetic and acoustic sounds that replicate that period of time over the piece.

An abandoned idea was inspired by Robert Ashley who used stones and wires to create music in The Space Theater alongside Gordon Mumma in the early 1960′s but this idea has transfered with my use of concrete sounds. However as they were building their own instruments from Radio Shack kits, these being from this period, I felt it too inauthentic to replicate what I imagine Ashley to compose for the composition.

3. Note one particular audio technique you applied in this task which you had not applied before.

*Using all the waves combined in one short composition was a new challenge so I just recorded a cycle~, tri~ and saw~ initially at 400 Hz in MaxMSP with an added Square wave from Logic at 1045.0Hz . I am also a big fan of reverberation but only added a small amount to the pitch shifted female voice that is a concrete sound. Other effects is a tape flutter on a triangle wave that comes in at 1.10 and some white noise from MaxMSP to create a sweeping texture with a LP filter on it.

4. Note one particular music technique you learned through doing this task.

*I have new blended different wave forms together in this way in Logic and the test oscillator plug in was a new discovery.

5. In your view, how is this task an example of practice as research?

*Using the limited sound sources is a great form of practice as research as one has to use available materials in an imaginative and creative way to fulfil the task criteria in the same way that the composers from that period had to. It is easily overlooked that they were extremely restricted by if you comapre what technology we have available today but they were very enterprizing with their equipment and used their imaginations. By copying some of the techinques I learnt how to be imaginative with quite minimal resources.

6. Autoevaluation: what mark would you give yourself for this task and why.

63%. I missed a class due to a cold and perhaps the task requires a verbal commentary although I think this is a nice presentation of resources available to the composers at that time.

Here is the track:  http://soundcloud.com/scott-simons/task2

Bibliography

Holmes, T (2002 Second edition), Electronic And Experimental Music, Routledge, New York

Pioneers of Electroacoustic Composition ::: :: :

Revisiting Pierre Schaeffer, Ferrari, Xenakis and Stockhausen was a good refresher of the work and the techniques that these pioneers used in the 1940′s, 50′s and ’60′s. It is inspirational to hear the creative manipulation of sounds from the environment using turntables for Études de bruits (“studies of noise”) and tape to compose. The simple processes that include reversing, pitch manipulation and looping are powerful compositional tools despite being basic and limited compared to what we have at our disposal to manipulate sound at relatively cheap prices today. Reduced listening was important and influenced people to listen in a more effective manner to sound events (l’objet Sonore) by removing traditional instrumentation and notation. Using acousmatic methods of producing music, hearing not seeing and to listen without searching for identification the sound source, these composers creative approaches and their compositions are still influential to new generations of music makers. These techniques were original and made possible due to the equipment available at institutions such as RTF and GRM in Paris and WDR in Cologne. It is sampling in the purest sense and also an early example of field recording that blossomed in the 1970′s and continues to grow as an area of composition.

Our first task is close miccing that was a technique Xenakis used in Concrete PH where charcoals were recorded and used as sound source for composing. My sound source choice was my washing machine as close miccing exposed a rhythmic clicking that contrasted with the shudders and drones of the cycle. I approached the task by recording four sections, two with an Edirol Wave recorder (stereo) and two recordings with an induction coil pick up (mono) that captures electrical sounds at close inspection. The mixing and editing process used contrasting sounds that had little manipulation except some looping (locked grooves), pitch shifting and some simple filtering (high and low).

After listening to the GRM compilation cd’s that celebrate thirty years of the INA (The Institut National de l’Audiovisual), featuring Ferrari, Risset, Henry and Schaeffer, etc, I felt that contrasts in timbre, pitch and spatial separation need to be part of the composition. To simply edit in a similar manner to tape splicing and also by using the techniques employed by these early pioneers I wanted to construct a piece that had dynamics and contrast. It was harder than I initially thought as it became a modal drone moving from from low tones to high spin cycles and a static pulse that sounded good but not quite in keeping with the cut up editing that is prominent in the concrete pieces I know. The actual machine was also clearly distinctive throughout so I also had to work on separating the object from the sound and exploring close miccing techniques, inspired by repeated home listening to Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I, to create new timbres using filters (hp/lp) and moving the microphones. After careful editing, trying not to lose the compositional progressions and contrasting sound objects, I finally finished the piece that uses the techniques that reflect the spirit and technological restraints of music concrete using just a washing machine as a sound source.

Here is the track:  http://soundcloud.com/scott-simons/electro-acoustic1

Overall Mark 70%.