Shorts: #29 Raining Up

Commissioned and titled by Autumn Looijen

This piece was created using a MOTM Synthesizer and mixed in Ardour. There were several false starts. I had been doing field recordings of storms and for a while, every artificial sound I made seemed to also sound like weather. The title Autumn chose seems to indicate that I didn’t quite get away from weather-related sounds.

I have started accepting commissions of one minute pieces again, and I’ve dropped the price since the last round. If you’d like to commission me, check out my online shop thing. Order now to beat the holiday rush!

Shorts: #28 Untitled

Commissioned and (un)titled by Cecile Moochnek

I wasn’t looking for a commission when I walked into the Cecile Moochnek Gallery on 4th Street in Berkeley. I was looking to do Christmas shopping. But I got talking to the gallery owner about art and music and she asked me to write her a short piece. This was in December of 2007. I wrote the piece in 2008, but didn’t hear back about a title and got busy with other things. Until today when inquiring about a title for a new commission, I realized this one had never been posted.

I made this piece with a Evenfall MiniModular Synthesizer. This was a all-in-one box modular synthesizer from the 1990′s. It’s a great little synth.

Commissioned and titled by Josh Fruhlinger. (2007)

Josh gave me the title before I started the piece. Gil Thorp is the name of a surreal American newspaper comic which is supposed to be about high school sports. Josh runs a blog discussing newspaper comics, called the Comics Curmudgeon.

I recorded (British) football from my TV, which included my housemate clapping after a goal. Then, I decided to use white noise, because it’s very similar to crowd sounds. I filtered it a lot to make sort of screetchy sounds. The football announcers didn’t exactly have the accent that I would expect Marty Moon to have, so I kept them in the background. My girlfriend said that it struck her as very Mark Trail-like, so I raised the volume of the background at the end, to make the sports connection clearer.

Bird-like sounds remind me of high school sports, but that’s probably because my high school had a terrible seagull infestation.

I suspect this particular piece might get especially high traffic, so I made a little YouTube video to go with it, but feel free to grab the mp3 if you prefer.

Shorts #27: Gil Thorp (2007)

Shorts: #25 Untitled

Commissioned and (un)titled by Scott Wilson

I talked today about whether or not he wanted to give me a title, and Scott noted that the piece has a “flatuent quality,” but it would be better to resist referencing that in a title.

To make this piece, I recorded myself playing a bovine signaling horn and a didjeridu, both of which I ran through a Sherman filterbank to use as FX. There’s also a little bit of feedback, especially the very last sounds. Processing a didgeridu turns out to be much more straightforward and easy than processing a cow horn. Something to keep in mind.

Shorts: #26 Ecstatic Rivulet

Commissioned and titled by Clyde Niesen

For this piece, I wanted to use a field recording that I made while camping over the summer. Visually, the campground looked like it would make a suitable set for a horror movie. The animals were correspondingly loud and screetchy at night and so I made a recording with my cell phone.

I listened to the recording a few times and it made me think of GrainPic, a project that I had intended to abandon. Everything I do with this always sounds kind of rough and unpolished, which is why I stopped working with it. But it seems to fit well with my memory of that campground.

Shorts: #23 Gamut

Commissioned and titled by Devin Hurd

I made this piece several weeks ago and I’m afraid that my methods have left my memory. It is made with an MOTM analog synthesizer.

Shorts: #24 For College Promo

Commissioned and titled by Jean Sirius, who is using it for a video sound track.

I wanted to something that started out collegiate, but got more playful further in. The opening is square waves, which are pulse-width modulated and slightly frequency modulated. While I was recording them, my dog was sleeping nearby. She started barking in her sleep. The almost never barks when she’s awake, but when she’s asleep, she barks quiet, air, high pitched barks which cause her snout to slightly inflate, since she doesn’t open her mouth. I think she’s having nightmares when she does it, but nevertheless, it’s really cute. Maybe she’s actually dreaming of chasing pigeons? The sleep-barking sounded really great with the music! I couldn’t record my dog without accidentally waking her, so instead I tried to mimic the sound with a sherman filterbank. I failed miserably, but I like the sounds that I got. Everytime I use this instrument, I have a little more fun with it and like it a little bit more. It’s frustrating at first, but the effort is paying off.

Shorts: #22 For Benjamin Britten

Commissioned and titled by Michael Strickland (aka sfmike)

Mike gave me the title before I wrote the piece. I spent a lot of time thinking about what to do with this. This last year, I learned that the Phillips Corporation had intended to get Britten to do the music for their pavilion in the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair.. They first went to their preferred architect, Le Corbusier, and he insisted that they use the music of Edgard Varèse. instead and Philips agreed. Their reason for initially wanting Britten was due to the popular success of his orchestral piece, The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. It’s a piece with an optional vocal part which explains what instruments are playing as the musical themes pass through the different sections. They thought he could do something with a Young Person’s Guide to Electronic Music.

This came up in my classes because the studio that Philips built for Varèse eventually become the Sonology course, in which I am now enrolled. We have a large portrait of Varèse working on his composition on one wall. But what if they had not given into Corbusier’s demands and had just picked a different architect? I purchased a copy of the Young Person’s Guide and listened to it a few times, trying to imagine what Britten might have done with the Phillips Pavilion. It was boring! So I listened a few times to his much preferable War Requiem. Testcase suggested that I do something with the poetry of Wilfred Owen, since Britten used his work. I decided to combine both approaches.

After Varèse, Koenig started a course in electronic music, which also helped form Sonology. I got a copy of the instructions on how to realize Koenig’s Terminus. His instructions were more or less state-of-the art at the time, and thus would be related to what Britten would have done. I focussed on attacks and synchronization, synchronizing to the middle of every note except for the last few notes. I used some voltage control to change attack shapes – something that couldn’t be done at that time, but is labor-saving. The attack shapes are two different kinds of triangles, sines, sawtooth going up, sawtooth going down and square. Most of the sounds are tuned sines, but I added some variation later by using triangle waves and FM modulation, the later of which was definitely not available, but there were way more complicated techniques at the time that lead to similar sonic results.

The poem is Anthem for Doomed Youth, read by me. It’s stereoized by putting the right and left slightly out of synch, and is quiet. However, this doesn’t make it sound far away, because it sounds so close miced. This is the only non-mono part. The Philips Pavilion was all about spatialization, but this is an alternate universe where Philips refused Corbusier’s demands and got a different architect. Xenakis never wrote Metastasis. Curtis Roads never wrote his book on microsounds. River Runs was never written. Computer music takes a drastically different direction. And we all wear silver clothes and have flying cars.

Shorts: #21 Anarchy and Rapture

Commissioned and titled by Polly Moller in memory of Leigh Ann Hussey, who died tragically in a motorcycle accident on May 16, 2006.

I didn’t ever meet Leigh Ann, but I typed her name into google and found a memorial. It was clear right away that I would have liked her. Polly said, “she was like a pillar of fire,” the god of Moses. I’ve been reading a deconstruction of the Left Behind books from an evangelical who is as appalled by them as I am. The series is essentially about death, which comes for us all. A mystery we fear and around which we grope for meaning. In How We Die, Sherwin B. Nuland argues that death is what gives life meaning. We feel urgency to act and to create because we know it’s not forever.

But despite the meaning that death gives our lives, despite the necessity of entropy in the creation of life and it’s inherent implication of destruction, despite the beautiful simplicity, it still feels like a theft. I never knew Leigh Ann, but I’ve known many who have passed. Every time, I ask the same question. I know the answer, but I don’t feel it.

To create this piece, I recorded myself screaming and then convolved it with some impulses generated by SuperCollider. (The code is below.) I used Audacity to pitch shift some of the versions of this file and mixed them with sounds from my synthesizer.

Code

The SuperCollider code requires Locator.sc. (If you already have this file, you should re-download it, as I found two bugs while working on this.) It computes phase delays and amplitude differences for stereo spatilaization.

SynthDef("spatial-subliminal-impulse", {arg out = 0, gate = 1, min_repeats = 10000,
							max_repeats = 20000, delay_time_left,
							delay_time_right, left_amp, right_amp;

	var env, white, ir, left, right;

	env = EnvGen.kr(Env.adsr(0.001, 0.001, 1, 0.001, 1, -4), gate, doneAction:2);

	white = WhiteNoise.ar;
	white = white * (max_repeats - min_repeats);
	white = white + min_repeats;
	white = white.abs;

	ir = Dust.ar(white);

	left = DelayC.ar(ir, 0.05, delay_time_left) * left_amp * env;
	right = DelayC.ar(ir, 0.05, delay_time_right) * right_amp * env;

	Out.ar(out, [left, right]);

}).store;

(

	var loc, min, max, amp, pb;

	min = 100;
	max = 200;
	amp = 0.9;

	loc = Locator.new;
	pb = Pbind(

		\instrument, 	Pseq(["spatial-subliminal-impulse"], 60),
		\min_repeats,	Pfunc({ min / 5 }),
		\max_repeats,	Pfunc({ max /5 }),
		\dur,		Pfunc({0.5 + 0.5.rand }),
		[\left_distsance, \left_delay_time, \left_amp,
			\right_distance, \right_delay_time, \right_amp],
					Pfunc({ loc.get_stereo_information(loc.right_speaker.rand,
						loc.right_speaker.rand, amp / 5) }) 

		);

	Ptpar([0, pb, 0, pb, 0, pb, 0, pb]).play

)

Shorts: #20 Poodleface Birthday

Commissioned by Graham Coleman in honor of Rob’s birthday. Happy Birthday Rob!

I made this piece in BEA 5 in Sonology in the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. I was hung over (after playing tuba the night before) and up at an extremely early hour because my dog had an early dress rehearsal for a concert that evening. I walked by BEA 5 and it was empty! I had one of those rare moments of clarity where a patch is entirely clear. I knew exactly how to tune the oscillators and where to route them. I love chaos patches, but their over-use can be cheesy. But Rob just recorded an album with a casio keyboard. So no worries there. I used all 16 oscillators, cascading them into chaos and then sent the output of them to the control inputs of the VOSIM. I sent the output of that to the third octave filter, which I used to damp the highs and also because it adds a nice character to everything it touches. It was too early to be awake, I’d slept too few hours and I was hung over, so despite my clarity, I misplugged a bunch of wires, accidentally sending the sine output and the square output of the same oscillator to two different inputs of the VOSIM, when I’d meant to take sine outputs of two different oscillators. It didn’t matter. It sounded great. Maybe better. I recorded everything in less than half an hour and then came home and mixed it quickly, like a romantic poet inspired by a tree.

Shorts: #19 Spin cycles

Commissioned and titled by Nick Fox-Gieg.

I made this piece with idea of making it ballet-like, but it ended up a different kind of dance-y. I controlled the rhythm with an LFO pulse wave, controlled by another LFO pulse wave. In the last section, there is also an envelope on the filter, which becomes more important than the envelope on the amplitude. This piece reminded me of playing bass guitar. Also, it was fun sliding the tracks around to get the beats to match up. The MOTM has very, very stable oscillators, which kept the beats in synch across over an hour, while I fiddled with other knobs and recorded tracks.

Nick is constantly amazed that the kids today listen to music via their cellphones – not with the headphones, but with the internal speaker, so this piece has low frequencies which distort on tiny speakers.

Nick is working on a film to go with this music. It will be posted to his video cast, which is at http://www.fox-gieg.com/spiders/.

Shorts: #18 lizardpoints

Commissioned and titled by Travis Johns.

I made this piece with an MOTM synthesizer. For some reason, I forgot to write down what patch I used, but I remember that it involved sending pulses through the low pass filter with the Q turned all the way up.

Shorts: #17 linea punteggiata

Commissioned and titled by Alan Anzalone.

This piece was made using a morse code translator from the internet. Some of the sounds come from a file format conversion that failed to work correctly. The rest are from my MOTM analog synthesizer.

I was inspired to make a piece using morse code from the loss of my previous cell phone. When I received an SMS on it, it would spell out SMS in Morse code. I thought it would be nice if it could also spell out the name of the message sender or even the message. However, the phone went much, much slower than standard morse goes. I still think this is a good idea, though, at least for names.

Shorts: #16 Delaware Covered in Red Velvet

Commissioned and titled by Matt Davignon.

This piece was created with my MOTM synthesizer. I took a couple of the oscillators and ring modulated them and AM modulated them. I sent the ring modulation to a high pass filter, the AM to a low pass filter and mixed them together with a notch filter. This has a very analog synthesizer sound, also the brittleness (for lack of better terminology) is a characteristic sound of the MOTM 420 filter, which I used for the high pass and for notch.

Shorts: #15 Space Corridor

Commissioned and titled by Graham Coleman.

I made this pieace in the BEA 5 lab at Sonology at the Royal Conservaory in The Hague, Netherlands. This uses MIDI-controlled analog oscillators and the primary sound source. My friend Nick Fox-Gieg set up the MIDI control from his laptop and helped me with a MAX patch. The oscillators went out to the plate reverb – which is an actual 200 kilo plate hanging in the attic someplace. The output of that was ring modulated and sent back to the plate. A lot of the signal also went through the lovely third octave filter in the lab.

The one drawback of the plate is that there’s a lot of hiss in the connection to it. I used the TAP de-Esser and some EQ to lessen the hiss. It also took some of the ‘pop’ out of some of the notes, which makes the whole piece smoother.

Graham is planning on remixing this piece.