Category: Creative Sound Projects

Last night I attended an event promoted by Snap Crackle and Pop, the lineup was Helm, Container and Cube.

The night started off with Cube doing an audiovisual experience, he played tracks off his Mac and used an Sm57 for vocals which mainly consisted of sort of spoken word. The visuals behind him were the highlight of the night as they fit perfectly with the mood of the set. They consisted of pictures of Jay-Z doing the illuminati hand sign to pictures of people washing their hands. The visuals matched perfectly with the BPM of the tracks and were very hypnotic.

The next performance was by Container, this set was very straightforward and intense. He was playing part of his tracks off of cassettes and was improvising the rest with hardware.

The final performance was from Helm who was doing live synthesis and improvised playing, his set was very ambient and dark, I think his set should’ve been first as it was underwhelming as the last set.

Ableton LINK allows you to connect devices to Ableton and match the BPM so that all devices will be synced in time. Ableton LINK has many IOS apps that are compatible from big synth brands such as Moog and Korg. In my final piece I could implement a recording from iPhone into part of the track. I downloaded a few of the Moog apps such as the Model 15 which is a modular synethesier replication, the Animoog Z which lets you do multi sensory music production, the Moog Filtration which is a realtime audio filter and effects engine and the Model D which is a MiniMoog engine.

VCV rack is a plug-in that replicates eurorack and can be used within DAWs.

Eurorack – modular synthesis

Kraftwerk – Autobahn :

• Moog Minimoog
• ARP Odyssey
• Farfisa Rhythm Unit 10 & Vox Percussion King (customised)
• Farfisa Professional Piano
• Schulte Compact Phasing A
• Mutron Biphase

Parts of a subtractive synthesiser – LFO , Filter, Envelope, Oscillator, Waveform

Robert Moog was an East Side “engineering physisict and a pioneer of electronic music”. He is the founder of the brand Moog which have been releasing synthesisers since the 1950’s. The brand and the creator have inspired countless artists both present and past.

Subtractive synthesis is just one method of synthesis, it consists of an audio signal that is put through an oscillator into a filter then amplifier.

Attack Decay Sustain Release – Envelope

Something that can be used as the raw component for a piece of music, sampling,

musique concrete using tape machines to record sound objects, manipulating them and rearranging them. using blocks of sound.

took lots of found sound, removing them from their context and creating sounds with them.

Removing the attack of a recording of a bell you get a completely different sound.

Start to discover and reveal what’s inside the sound

Pierre Henry – L’Apocalypse de Jean

Further research – Pierre Henry, Pierre Schaffer,

Glossary –

Serialism – Method of composition using series of pitches, rhythms, dynamics, timbres and other musical elements.

Above is the Ableton file for the track, the track has 12 layers, it was made

Artwork ideas / experimentation with Nvidia’s GauGan2 –

Psychoacoustics is the psychophysical study of acoustics, it is about how we perceive sound and

“Due to our hearing limits, you may find that high-passing frequencies around 30 Hz brightens a mix by removing unimportant low-end information that is hard to perceive, although this is not always the case. Increasing that filter to 50–60 Hz, while reducing the high-end to 10–12 kHz, will make mixes and instruments sound “lo-fi,” replicating the poor frequency response of old recording technology.”

https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/psychoacoustics-how-perception-influences-music-production.html

“Pauline Oliveros was one of the true giants of 20th century music. She was also one of our great teachers. She continued working, with boundless energy, well into the 21st century. On the dark day after the US presidential election of 8 November, two weeks before her death at age 84, she was teaching karate to rattled undergraduate students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. (The undergrads, according to Oliveros’ PhD student Andrea Williams, had trouble keeping up with their octogenerian professor; Oliveros was a black belt.)”

Reading this article on Pauline Oliveros has inspired me to experiment with tape looping and repetition.

Sonic Meditations –

1. Mirror
2. Kinetic Awareness—Make your last audible breath a sung tone
3. Circle—Visualize your signature letter by letter slowly. Simultaneously hearing your name. Do this forward, then backwards. (Without sound) See your signature in a selected color. Do these with eyes closed and eyes open.
4. Bowl Gong Meditation. If you lose track of the pitch or want to verify your memory hit the gong again.
5. Walk once around the room as slowly as possible backwards

Kurt Schwitters – The greatest sound poem of the 20th century

https://www.frieze.com/article/pauline-oliveros-1932-2016

Alberto Bernal is a classically trained sound artist from Spain who’s work consists of installation pieces, performance art, video art and concerts. He also is a lecterur and teaches composition at the university of music of zaragoza. I was very intriged by his impossible music series which consits of a lot of graphic scores like the ones shown below. I decided to turn my favourite of his scores into midi and play Ableton’s waveform through it, this is how it sounded/looked.

Brian Eno was a pioneer of ambient music. I first found out about Brian Eno through his work with David Bowie especially on his albums Low and Heroes. I have also listened to all of his solo albums with Here Comes The Warm Jets being my favourite. I found out about his ambient work after listening to a lot of his more pop / rock music. Music for Airports was released in 1979, Music for Airports consists of four songs, 1/1, 1/2, 2/1 and 2/2. All four of the songs are around the 10 minute mark which is a lot longer than the conventional song length ( 3-5 minutes long). The album was made with very long tape loops playing various piano, choir and synth 3-4 note phrases.

“The particular piece I’m referring to was done by using a whole series of very long tape loops, like fifty, sixty, seventy feet long. There were twenty-two loops. One loop had just one piano note on it. Another one would have two piano notes. Another one would have a group of girls singing one note, sustaining it for ten seconds. There are eight loops of girls’ voices and about fourteen loops of piano. I just set all of these loops running and let them configure in whichever way they wanted to, and in fact the result is very, very nice. The interesting thing is that it doesn’t sound at all mechanical or mathematical as you would imagine. It sounds like some guy is sitting there playing the piano with quite intense feeling. The spacing and dynamics of “his” playing sound very well organized. That was an example of hardly interfering at all.“

I have listened to this album many times before finding it for this reserarch and it has definitely inspired a lot of my work outside of uni.

https://www.discogs.com/master/6265-Brian-Eno-Ambient-1-Music-For-Airports

https://reverbmachine.com/blog/deconstructing-brian-eno-music-for-airports/

“The score consists of 10 sheets of paper and 12 transparencies. The sheets of paper contain drawings of 6 differentiated (as to thickness and texture) curved lines. 10 of these transparencies have randomly distributed points (the number of points on the transparencies being 7, 12, 13, 17, 18, 19, 22, 26, 29, and 30).”

This piece has inspired me on making my graphic score a I like the style of layering paper and this is something I could include in my final graphic score.

https://johncage.org/pp/John-Cage-Work-Detail.cfm?work_ID=79

What is a graphic score? A graphic score / graphic notation is a way of representing audio in a visual form in opposed to using the traditional musical notation.

A graphic score is open to interpretations and none can necessarily be right or wrong as it is a personal response to the music/audio. It became popular in the 1950s to challenge the idea of classical musical notation.

During researching graphic scores I found a few from my favourite musicians. This is Brian Eno’s graphic score for Music for Airports, he created it as he’s not a trained musician and cannot read music. He used symbolism to represent different phrases or loops which are separated by white space to represent time in-between the phrases.

I found a video on Vimeo about Aphex Twin’s remote orchestra, in the 2011 video he used midi controllers to cue a graphic score which a 48 part orchestra and a 24 piece choir followed, it was supposedly done in one rehearsal.

John Cage:Aria

For my graphic score I decided to use an