CHANGE FOR RECORDING AND PRODUCTION

i moved all my blog for recording and production, to gather all the texts together, to this address:

http://kikiproductions.co.uk

submitting the portfolio – acousmatic composition

The tasks I composed and changed during the semester are contrasted in the approach of the composition. The first one is more rhythmical and the second one is more melodic because they have two different sources. The first one is based on clocks, which is a rhythmical source mostly, and the second one is based on voice. The first task has two parts where the first is made mostly of natural sounds and the second has electronically processed sounds. The second task uses sounds mostly changed in IXI Quarks.

In every piece I am trying to tell a story using different approaches, trying to experiment with sounds, hoping that the listener will understand what the story is.

In my first task I am trying to express though familiar sounds, the way life changed after technology began to become a major part of life. I start with church bells and sounds from old clocks reminiscent of times when everything was relatively relaxed with low rhythms. Then, using electronic sounds and alarm sounds, I am trying to express the anxiety that modern life and rhythm has pressed upon humans that can put their body and psychology in danger.

In the second task I am trying to tell a story about how psychology is fragile and sometimes it reminds you of a baby that cries when his toy is broken. I think depression can be compared to a baby’s cry. The baby’s need for toys can be translated as a need to fulfil psychological needs for love, understanding and communication and how consumerism is a way in which people try to replicate, unsuccessfully, these resources.

week 10-12

After showing my two tasks to Julio, I decided to do some changes to the pieces. I was advised to give more space to the sound and give small spaces from one sound to the other. Having that in mind, I changed the length of the piece since both were about one minute, I added some synth sounds and audio sounds that I had manipulated in IXI Quarks and then I did the mixing and mastering. Every sound appears a little bit later to give space to the previous one. I repeated the most important sounds so they can become recognisable to the listener and help them understand the story of every piece. Moreover, I decided to do the surround automation for 5.1 in Hel 045 where we have the equipment and five speakers.

week 9 – acousmatic composition

This week I watched the video Julio posted on the blog about how to get surround automation ready for my piece in Logic without having to use the mixer to do live automation for every sound. The hard part is that since I do not have eight speakers of my own, I have to go to the university to check my pieces with this new information.

week 7- acousmatic composition

This week we discussed in class about the form of a piece. Even the most complicated pieces have a form that might be hard to recognise from the beginning. For example, the typical form in classical music is usually ABA, where A is the theme and B is the development. In modern music there is an introduction, one or two verses and choruses, an instrumental solo, back to verse and chorus and then the ending. In acousmatic composition the form is freer but again it exists, since acousmatic composition is a composition based on organising sound materials.

I decided to investigate this more by listening to some albums by composers like Dhomont who like using natural sounds such as waves etc. where the form gets complicated especially when the sounds are long lasting and changes are slow. A second listening or a third listening helped me to understand more about acousmatic music and make the form easier to distinguish.

week 6- acousmatic composition

Here is a link to a video, where i am playing with Ixi Quarks.

me_and_ixi_quarks

week 4- 5

I have collected clock sounds, which I am using for my first composition to present the anxiety of modern life. The first draft of this piece starts with sounds of old clocks and cuckoos and after the halfway point digital clocks and electronic sounds replace these. In the end of the piece, I am using male breathing to show the anxiety to make everything on time as a result of our bad physical and psychological health. I presented the draft in class just having the sounds in order without making any mixing or automation, just to become familiar with the mixer. Moreover, listening to the piece from eight speakers helps the composer to decide where to put every sound to create the feeling they want.
After presenting my piece in class, I decided to make the difference between life before and after high technology a little more obvious. I was introduced to IXI Quarks, a great program where you can take an audio sound and transform the sound in more ways than in any other program I have seen. You can use plenty of instruments in its environment such as scratcher etc. It can change the pitch, tempo and speed of the sound simply by moving the mouse on the waveform. Moreover, it can choose randomly different parts from the waveform creating interesting results. In the utilities you can find the recorder to record your experiments with the sound, and then enter them in Logic to edit them further.

week 1-3 acousmatic composition

In the first three weeks we were introduced to acousmatic composition, listening to pieces bye composers such as Normadeau, Dhomont and many more, all through an eight-monitor system. I realised that each student can give their own approach to a piece by changing the order of the speakers. The order we decided to give is 1-4 for the big speakers and 5-8 for the small ones, going clockwise. That helps to make the diffusion easy for example from the front speakers to the back speakers and create good atmosphere to the audience. The digital mixer we used is Yamaha 01V96, which has 32 channels but we only use 8, where each one represents one speaker. The way you move your hands on the mixer is really important for the performance, as if you do it too fast or too slow you might lose elements and parts of your composition. Long lasting sounds are easier to diffuse and repetition is important when it is not too often.

submitting the portfolio

The three tasks I am going to submit are the animation task, the movie task and the painting task. I chose these because I used real instruments for all of them and the sound that resulted had a warm tone and was more believable in comparison to MIDI sounds or software instruments. The volume, vibrato and soul of the music comes out much better with a real instrument and the audience believe and are much more positively emotive toward the music.

For the animation task, I used an accordion played by a professional musician, who studies Music therapy in Anglia Ruskin University. I used Logic and recorded her in Hel 044 using two SE Z3300A condenser microphones in AB configuration. The microphones had a distance of 40 cm from the source and 30 cm from each other. In the recording room I used my laptop to help in synchronizing the accordion with the movements of the animation’s characters. In the beginning I used a metronome, but it was easier for the performer to follow the rhythm of the characters than the metronome. To this end, I stayed inside the room with the performer, advising her on where to play each part she had to play, and showing the video for her to watch and play along with.

As well as the music, I did the sound design for the animation. For example I used sounds from EXS24 to give background (birds etc.), comedy sounds for the leaves, the birds when they crash to the ground etc. I also recorded some foley sounds, for example, the kissing sounds, while the movie was playing.
the movie task :

The film “Ghost”, is a drama about a young couple in New York. The main character was murdered and came back to haunt his wife as a ghost, to reveal the identity of his murderer. With the help of a psychic, he reaches his wife and they say their last goodbye. The scene that I chose sees the murderer revealed and the ghost saying goodbye to his wife in a sweet and very emotional and melancholic way. She is left crying but in the end she realises that he goes to a better place.
For this task, I recorded cello and acoustic bass played by a music student, using Protools and a Yamaha mixer in Hel 033. I placed the musician in the recital hall in order to record the ambience of the room, and used the SE microphones, one recording the sound from the hole and one directed at the strings. I asked the performer to play the cello legato, and the bass pizzicato without using the bow. The piece is written in A minor. The main melody was played by the high notes of the cello, and then the rest of the cello’s lines and the bass played the harmony. As mentioned before, the tempo is slow, hinting funerary music. After recording the instruments, I applied some compression and reverb and adjusted the volume levels to make the bass and melody sound stronger than the other parts.

The painting task:

I changed painting for task six, and the new painting fits better with the music I intended to write for the previous one. I chose “Aczent in Rosa” by Wassily Kandinski who was a Russian painter most famous for his abstract works. According to the French magazine “arts magazines”, ‘Kandinski became famous at the age of 44 after his exhibition called “Impression III”, where he used vivid squirted colours and shapes’. Moreover, in this magazine, they commented on a dialogue between Kandinski and Schoenberg discussing the revolution of arts. Kandinski believed that we can find truth in ‘antigeometry and contradiction’. The same article talks about the relationship between painters and musicians and how they can inspire each other.

The piece follows the painting from left to right, as in a regular musical score. I decided to give low frequency sounds for the dark colours for my task. For example the background is black, therefore I recorded low lasting sound of a saxophone to represent it. For the circles I decided to record the saxophone playing notes in three different octaves. Circles higher up in the painting are represented by higher pitched notes. The circles that are close to each other are represented by notes at intervals of a semitone or tone. The length of notes are indicated by the size of the circles. The squares signify aggressive saxophone sounds. The large yellow diamond shape which encompasses much of the painting is a quiet, constant tone, as the colour is a faint and delicate one that lasts from start to finish. In the middle of the painting there is a black square containing many circular events. I asked the saxophonist to improvise this section, as it reminded me of instrumental solos that commonly appear in the middle section of songs. I divided the painting into three sections: a 2.5 bar introduction, an 11 bar theme and improvisation and then a 2.5 bar conclusion. This was to give some structure to my piece, as the painting, as I read it, had an ABA form, since it starts and ends with the same shapes and principles; building up in the midsection from a sparse beginning, and fading down to a similar ending.

week 11 – movie task

The film “Ghost”, is a drama talking about a young couple in New York.Th guy was murdered and came back to his wife’s life as a ghost, to reveal the murderer.With the help of a psychic, he reaches his love and they say their last goodbye.The scene that i chose is where the murderer has already been revealed and the ghost says goodbye to his wife in a sweet but really emotional and melagholic way.She cries but in the end she realizes that he goes to a better place.
To create this atmosphere,I recorded in Protools double bass and cello with SE condenser microphones in the recital hall, adding the ambience of the room using the soundfield microphone!I am really pleased with the result, since Katerina, which is a student from the music department, did a great job!The sound of the cello playing legato gave the piece the melagholy that this scene needs.I wrote a melody for the soprano part and wrote a simple harmony in the key of Am to accompany it with cello and double bass, trying to make it simple but emotional.The slow tempo is usually used for funerals, so i wanted to give the sense of loss!