Bens Blog

So Acousmatics is finally over…. I didn’t even know acousmatic music existed before this module and I have benefitted hugely from completing this module.  I have greatly enjoyed this module, learning about the genre and about composing music for these means. I said at the beginning of this module that I think acousmatic music is all about creating an environment for the listener, putting them in any place you want but using whatever sounds you like. I still find this to be true for me. Whatever mood the composer is in they can transcribe it to sound, then the listener just gets to sit – literally – directly in the middle of their creation.

For my final composition I took the criticism I received from my first task and did something very different. I started by recording my own sounds; I went around picking up random objects including a metal chain, a glass, a fork and a plate and knocked and tapped them to make a variety of sounds. I recorded these straight into Pro Tools where I could develop and manipulate them using the elastic properties. Another thing I took into account in this composition was the use of silence. In my last composition I didn’t use any silence in the piece at all, just moving from one sound to another. With my new piece I think it’s much more episodic thanks to the use of silence, it just breaks it up more and allows for more frequent changes.

The four elastic properties in Pro Tools are Varispeed, Polyphonic, Rhythmic and Monophonic. Varispeed speeds up and slows down sounds (this is what I mainly used to create the drone sounds in my first piece), so the more low end and slowed sounds are likely to be created using that. I didn’t use any Rhythmic elastic time in this composition, I find it just picks out the peaks and uses them repetitively to create a rhythm and I didn’t find any space for that in this piece. I find Monophonic gives the sound a lo-fi/8 bit feel, especially the more extreme you are with the TCL tool. Polyphonic is very similar to this but there is slightly more clarity to the sounds that you manipulate.

I am very pleased with my second composition, now it’s completed I prefer it much more to my first. I found that by putting a little more effort and time in developing your sounds and giving space, you can achieve something much more interesting and meticulous to listen to. I think it’s a better experience for the listener too and especially in this Acousmatic genre, over a set of many loud speakers, it just magnifies the experience.

So I guess it’s time for our final composition in this Acousmatic module. Our final task is to compose an acousmatic piece that primarily uses automated panning over live diffusion.

Automation

For those who don’t know what automation is… Automation is basically an automated, digital process that automatically changes pre set values of a digital effect. So putting that in a  simple scenario would be panning.. You predetermine where you would like your sound to be panned (this can a combination of infinite places) and as the sound plays it will automatically pan to those places.

So here you can see… Where the lines are correspond to where the sound is being panned.

So for my first composition I went for long elongated drones, with lots of movement. With this composition I have decided to go for a piece thats based more on gestures, incorporating silence as well. I still want to keep the same amount of movement. I also want to use sounds that people can relate to.. So for example, manipulating sounds to sound like familiar things e.g. a plane flying overhead.

With this final task we have to choose which medium to compose our piece as well, that is between 5.1 and and good old stereo… The main difference between 5.1 and stereo are that with 5.1 you have much more control over how you pan things hence the “5″ being five speakers, and the “1″ meaning a sub woofer. So in 5.1 you can use surround sound for your mix. Whereas in stereo as we know we only have left and right.

For this assignment I have chosen to work in stereo. This is because I feel more comfortable working in this environment. I also feel that I can quite successfully create a surround field because I am so familiar in working in this medium.

Trevor Wishart: On Sonic Art

Before I start composing this piece I have taken some time looking into some of Trevor Wishart’s proposed techniques for diffusion. Chapter ten of his ‘On Sonic Art’ goes into this in great detail. Here are some screen shots I took for some inspiration.

From these sources I really like the ideas from 10.52, 10.49, 10.48, 10.41, 10.40, 10.37, 10.38, 10.39 and 10.23. I will definitely take some muse from these sources in my next composition.

Following the one minute composition I had to perform the previous week, it really opened up my eyes in what I wanted to achieve and what direction I wanted for my second composition. I decided that I basically wanted as much movement as I possibly could. I thought that I could achieve this by having longer, stretched sounds, combined with lots of fader movement to give a kind of additive/subtractive ripple texture. This with the combination of short ‘hit’ sounds (some with reverb some without) which could then be dissipated through the various speakers. I also used lo-fi sounds again for this composition, however I didn’t use any of my first one minute composition. This wasn’t for any particular reason, I just wanted to keep exploring different sounds and textures.

The performance of this piece went well I think. I used the technique I mention in my previous blog entry about seeing the incline in the wave form, and as it rises bringing up the faders, particularly the front two too. When I was composing my piece I wrote two of these in, one in the middle of the piece, then it dropped back down, then one finally at the end. Again with the longer stretched sounds I tried to keep as much fader movement as I could. Bring on the next composition.

Before todays lecture we had been assigned the task of composing a one minute piece of acousmatic music. However that composition could only consist of one sample…. I chose the sound of a sonar bleep, which appears at the beginning of a Coldplay song called ‘Amsterdam’. I chose this sound mostly because it was quite lo-fi and I liked the imagery it imposed. Before I started my composition I decided that I wanted it to be very ambient, this was because I like the idea of having minimal sounds accompanied by maximum movement.

So when it came to composing, I found myself mainly using the time stretch function (TCE) tool in Pro Tools. I set the channels to ‘Varispeed’ and occasionally ‘Polyphonic’, then sped up or slowed down the sounds. I used layers of the sound set at various speeds, some that spanned up to 20 or more seconds, and some that were more like hits. This was pretty much the only treatment I used, the only other was reversing several parts. Other than that I only used some reverb, delay and compression.

I thought the performance went quite well… I tried to have as much movement as I could. Always keeping faders moving. Another technique I tried was, as you’re looking at your laptop and you see the waveform increase to a peak. Move the faders up along with that incline, I feel this really increases the dynamic of the piece and draws a lot of attention to it.

Today was good fun. Simeon and myself were assigned the task of making a short presentation/diffusion to the class, with a piece of our choice. We did a little research into some acousmatic composers and compositions, and in the end we settled on Barry Truax’s ‘Pendledrom’. Barry Truax is a Canadian composer who specialises in soundscapes, sampled sounds and using real time granular synthesis. This piece particularly stuck out to me. “Pendledrom” is translated as “commuter dream” and in this piece I really liked the way Truax bridged a gap between a conscious and unconscious state of mind. Using stereotypical atmospheric sounds of a train station, then using growing synthetic sounds as the person is ‘drifting off’.

So we said a few things about the piece and Simeon set off for the first six minutes of diffusing. When it came to my turn, I found myself looking at the wave form on the laptop screen. I was looking to see the peaks and troughs and how if there was a climactic point in the piece, I would try and build that up slowly until it was right at the peak. With the more flowing electronic textures I tried to give them more movement, being more subtle with the fader movements.

Acousmatics is a form of electroacoustic music that is composed specifically to be heard via loudspeakers… This basically means that through basic compositional methods – e.g. panning – you can create something quite complex and effective, once review through a set of quadraphonic speakers.

Acousmatic music isn’t really derived from elements thought as ‘traditional’ such as melody, harmony and rhythm etc… It’s made from synthetic or sampled sounds with little or heavy inputs from digital sound processing.  This leads me to believe that acousmatic music is very much about creating an environment, because you have control over certain parameters you can really set moods and textures.