mike sands acousmatic composition

The piece begins with a collage of similar sounds made by a bottle bouncing against a table. The processing here is minimal, consisting mainly of light and simple granulation. On occasion, more extreme processing is used such as ring-filter (Ringz.ar in supercollider) or very heavy granulation . Soon the “carpet” enters and the bottle sounds make their exit. After some time of just the “carpet” the paper sounds enter and the same thing happens. Then the same again with the lion roaring.

When panning is concerned, i have used varying techniques which i feel work very effectively. In particular i find the ‘roar’ at 2’16″ to be very effective. It has been panned from one side to the other, with the duration of the sample. I have used this technique to great effect throughout the piece, also noticeable on many of the granulated bottle sound.

After all the sounds have had their foreground moments, all three of the types of source sound begin to merge together and make up a section all on their own. A loud and very reverberant lion’s roar finishes the “carpet” and is panned from left to right semi-rapidly as the reverb tail descends.

Finally the bottle sounds which opened the piece are repeated with a different structure at the end.

What i would have loved to have done with this piece was do something similar to what i have done, only using 100% animal noises, and to use a more environmental “carpet”. Perhaps even with the carpet changing much more rapidly that in real life as with Barry Truax or Jonty Harrison. I would have liked to have used animal sounds from totally different environments. for example, keeping the lion’s roar, but accompanying it with some whale song, or a chiwawa’s bark. I think that the piece would be much more effective like this, and that it would have some kind of concept.

I am however, very happy with the final result of the piece, and think that all three of the source sounds  worked very well.

since starting my second composition, i have made a few changes;

• i have used three recordings for my carpet of sound; one centred, and the other two hard panned to begin with, but as the piece goes on they gradually move to the opposite pan.
• the grains for these sounds are not beginning at a worked out rate, and so they do not ‘phase’ as a Steve Reich piece would… more just create a ‘carpet of sound’, which has frequent but short-lived moments of air and space.
• for the sounds going over the top, i have decided to just use one sound source for periods of time, and then after some time of just the carpet, begin using a different sound source. i have found that this works quite well.
• i begin with just one sound (a plastic bottle bouncing on a wooden table), played and then manipulated in various ways, then once the ‘carpet’ enters, it stops. after some time of just ‘carpet’, the second sound (a piece of paper being scrunched up) is played, and then manipulated.

i’ve had an idea for the ‘carpet of sound’ i have planned;

Barry Truax’s The Shaman Ascending consists of recordings of choirs granulized and phased almost Steve Reich style. They’re tuned to harmonies, and pan rapidly from right to left (a technique which Barry Truax seems to use a lot). i plan to keep my granulised sounds moving around a stereo image (i have also decided to stick to a stereo composition) very slowly and progressively. The sounds i plan to use are recordings which i will make during the next few days.

As i said before, over the top, i plan to use some more focused sounds in both pure and processed forms. Though before i can go into more detail, i should make more recordings.

I think i want to make the sounds come from different places, to try and create a fantasy “sound field” (if that’s the correct term) which would never exist in real life, much like what Jonty Harrison used in Unsound Objects, in which there were dry leaves being trodden on, but rain was falling.

This composition was made using two clips of Arve Henriksen’s free improvisation, and a recording the I made from outside Sainsburys at about noon.

First, i use the same idea of looping Arve Henriksen’s trumpet sounds very fast over the top of each other to create texture, this time lashed with some thick reverb. Underneath this comes a much lower trumpet sound, also shrouded in reverb, though not as much.

I answer this short section with a short section of high un-tuned sounds, followed by very low un-tunes sounds.

After a gap, i begin with a sparse selection of percussive sounding bursts of un-tuned sounds, run through a granular synth at varying reverb thickness. At certain points during these sounds, I play a section of Arve’s trumpet in full to answer it. Then i run the trumpet through the same granular synth, this time making the texture it created much more chaotic. Then this was joined by a similarly chaotic version of the un-tunes sounds. which finishes abruptly.

After some silence, the trumpet is run through the granular synth again, twice, so it builds a very thick texture of cascading trumpet pitches. Then the same sample is looped at a much lower pitch underneath, as a throwback to the first section.

I think my next composition will be focused completely on noise based, and will be similar to the soundscapes of Chris Watson and Barry Truax. I have an idea to use a carpet of sound, which i plan to either be made from light rain (which will be very difficult to record) or a selection of fans, fridges, air conditioning units… or anything that makes a continuous noise. if i decide to do a surround sound composition, i think this will work better as these can then be panned over more speakers, meaning i can create more adventurous soundscapes. stereo may still be interesting to work with in this sense though.

i then plan to have a verity of noises, both dry and processed, over the top, briefly taking the foreground. i plan for this to get busier and busier over four minutes.

i have no idea how i would finish it.

Pendlerdrøm (Commuterdream)

Is perhaps the piece i like most from all of the pieces that have been presented, and that i’ve listened to. After reading the sleeve-notes and then listening to the piece for second time i heard the piece in a new light. “The commuter lapses into a daydream in which the sounds that were only half heard in the station return to reveal their musical qualities” was something which i thought very effective, and extremely well implemented in the piece. I think that I would like to take much influence from this piece when composing my surround-sound composition.

Dominion

This is a piece for chamber ensemble and “two digital soundtracks” (which i presume means an arrangement of sounds). It is intended to be a journey across the country of Canada. In 100% honesty, i couldn’t hear that in the piece, but perhaps this is because i know basicaly nothing about Canada. If i were to study this piece in depth, then i would do more research.

I feel like i can take a huge amount of influence from this piece when composing both of my compositions, but more so for the first. Throughout this piece, there is constant sound, mainly from the chamber ensemble which had been composed in a fashion that reminded me of John Adams’ “Dharma At Big Sur” (a piece written for orchestra and solo electric violin). “Dominion” consists of layered tones emitting from different sections of the ensemble, and the piece feels suspended in time, which is relevant because the journey across Canada is supposed to remain at the time of 12 noon (as it says in the sleeve notes).

Diffusion of this piece would have to be fairly gradual, and would probably be relatively limited because of the constant sound. this is why i only plan to re-create something along these lines for perhaps one half or even just one minute of my first composition. Because the second is automated, it would be much more interesting to do something along these lines, and i am already having ideas for what i would like to be doing for my second composition. I think i’ll wait until the first is over with before I continue.

i tried applying reduced listening to many chris watson recordings and pieces;

i particularly enjoyed doing this on the second track of “Weather Report”, entitled The Lapaich. it’s very chaotic, and features many busy, staccato sound objects and towards the end the whole thing is broken, though only quietly, by a long sound, modulating in pitch very slowly and subtly. it’s some kind of deer in reality, but what it is as a sound object is a very pure sounding noise, occasionally broken by a very rough and fast-percussive moment, where the vocal chords of the deer vibrate very slowly… kinda like when a human moves from falsetto to normal voice.

using my one sound of 8 seconds in length (i usually start it from about half a second in too), i found it a challenge to think up so many variations… i think i may have made a mistake in choosing something that’s… sort of… tuned to specific pitches, because you soon get bored of the sound played in it’s entirety… however, i feel that i’m pleased with the result, and it’s actually about 2 minutes in length. The piece is kind-of in three sections…

SECTION A

I began by speeding up the sample to four different speeds… very high speeds, and looping them to make a constant sound. then played the sample, as it is, twice… once at normal speed, then a bit faster. i intend to make this entire sound-scape circle around the room in diffusion.

SECTION B

… consists of short bursts of sound, usually of granulated segments of the sample. I would like to make these bursts come out of different speakers at differing levels… and have detailed what to do in the score.

SECTION C

is four of the soundfiles played at different speeds, followed by a granulated and slow play of it… intended to be circulated arund the room, ending with the back-left channel.

all of this i detailed in a graphic score, which i’ll use to aid my diffusion.

over the past few hours, i’ve been choping up some full improvisations of arve henriksen and have selected 16 of his more interesting phrases. i just put them into supercollider and started seeing what i could do with them. From just a short period of doing this i suddenly realised that I’m going to have to be pretty careful not to make this just a procession of samples placed on after the other (which is what i started doing, but have now stopped). i find his trumpet tone sound very very good slowed to nearly half speed, and that an algorithmic patch randomly playing his phrases produces a wall of dissonant, sometimes atonal noise, but it never sounds brash and rough edged. I also took several of his phrases, and then looped them at rediculously high tempos (i.e… 15 times normal speed)… i may use this

i have a feeling most of what i’m going to be doing is going to be algorithmic instead of thoroughly composed and controlled.

I listened attentively to Normandeau’s “Clair De Terre”… and felt like i had something to say;

Throughout it’s many movements, I find it seems to rely on regular rhythmic pulses too much. I much preferred the sections without the regular pulse. for example… i really enjoyed “Couleurs Primaires Et Secondaires” (movement 3 would you call it?) but i felt that “Montage Rythmique” was too dependent on it’s pulse. When listening to it, i did not notice that this was what it was called. But still, it feels too hooked on it’s steady beat. I would say that i dis-liked it.

I do feel that the use of the pulse is put to slightly better use in “Ouverture”, but i think this may be because the sounds based around the pulse, i think, completely ignored it.

In the lesson, we listened to two Jonty Harrison pieces. The one that i remember the most however was “Unsound Objects”. I have studied this piece a little before, but after the lecture i got it from the library and listened again by myself;

In the lecture i knew very little about the piece and it’s meaning, and so i attempted to listen while applying Schaeffer’s 3rd mode of listening… I found this a monumental challenge, because at the time i felt that Harrison was making life extra difficult with his placement of sounds… for example… immediately after the sound of a door opening, he would introduce a soundscape of a rainy day or something similar.

However, once i took this piece from the library i was slightly more educated, in that Harrison composed these pieces with a storyline of sorts in mind, and found the piece a more enjoyable listen. However, i don’t feel so interested in this mode of composition… Not enough to get the desire to compose something similar myself.

On the subject of composition, i’ve been having many many thoughts about my first one, which only really exists as ideas and scraps of code.

there is this trumpet player by the name of Arve Herniksen, and i find his tone absolutely fascinating… Here’s a clip;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuckrXPqscg

on one of his early recordings, he did many unaccompanied improvisations, and i would like to maybe create a composition using exclusively these as my sound sources. I think that this would be very enjoyable to compose, and would be very interesting to diffuse.

my other idea is to use recordings from purely animal based sources, but i think i would like to save that for the second composition, so that i have plenty of time to gather all of the samples i need.

Denis Smalley;

I listened to 4 pieces by Smalley, and after a very short period of time through “Piano Nets” i began to realise just how difficult it is to apply Schaeffer’s 3rd mode of listening. I was brought up listening to jazz, where it’s more than reasonable to imagine the performer playing whatever instrument is being played. I think it would take a lot of dedicated listening to eventually be able to apply this listening technique.

In “Piano Nets” I heard it being divided into 3 movements, with some longer gaps of silence in-between. The first consisted of some impressionistic, floating dissonant harmonies on piano, and a collection of synthesised sounds, many of which sound like they had been derived from processed piano recordings.

At 7″, what i would believe to be the second movement starts, and is a much more jagged and intense section. I feel that this, out of the three sections works the best. I think the combination of synth sounds chosen by Smalley and the sound of the piano seems to fit together much easier when the texture is awash with more staccato notes and hits.

“Piano Nets” for me, was the most successful of the pieces that i listened to, but there was several other things that i noticed when listening to “Clarinet Threads”…

For a start, i was unable to detach the key-clicking sounds from their source. Whenever i hear it in the piece, my mind switches immidiately to thinking about keys clicking on a clarinet.

Also, at one moment in the piece (after quickly breezing through it again, i could not find the exact moment), the clarinet played a very high, loud long held note. I could hear the performer’s embouchure changing and moving ever so slightly. As a sax player, i know this happens without you being able to do anything about it.

Did anyone else notice this? Or is it just me being a woodwind player?