Nintendoboe

Video by Zaratustra,

Oboe by William McGlothlin,

Composition and Sequencing by me!

Song and Remix

Zaratustra created a game called Fugue back in 2002.  It was for an Hours of VERGE competition (where you have a certain number of hours to create a game from scratch).  He used a public domain song to go with it, but he wanted something that fit the game a little better, so I whipped up a song in an evening.  I think the only requirement was that it had to sound baroque (or use some kind of baroque instrumentation), so it features a harpsichord sample rather heavily.

I’m sure all three of you who read this (including however many of you who are actually me) are familiar with this tune, but it jumped out at me tonight while perusing some of my old stuff, so I thought I’d upload it.

Fugue

Later, Zara was looking for music to use in Zeta’s World.  I volunteered some music from earlier games, and since he didn’t plan to sell Fugue, its music was up for grabs.  I assumed he’d want a remix of the music, so that way he could have the main version of the level play the above song and an alternate version play the remix below.  It was used for a level called “Sunspot”.

It kind of diverges from the original, but that’s alright.  This version was made in late 2004, according to the timestamp on the Impulse Tracker file.

Fugue-Sunspot

Most of the Zeta’s World soundtrack is by Troupe, and it’s good stuff. I guess I’m the “guest artist” for that soundtrack :)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Count The Ways

Last term I submitted a solo viola piece in three movements and was 1 of 4 entrants accepted into a composers competition at my school.  The brief was to write a new piece for a specific instrumentation (fl cl ob bsn f.hn tpt perc vln1 vln2 vcl1 vcl2 cb), use a melody or motive from a piece of music written before 1685, and make sure it ended up four minutes or shorter.

Count_the_Ways.mp3

06-Mar-2009 21:34

8.5M

The piece was written in 6/4 (because it had bits with a 6/8 feel and other bits with a 3/4 feel), so it seemed best to write it so that either division of the beat could be played… but that meant conducting it in 6 and it ended up slower than written (it also had some tricky parts).

But it turned out pretty well.  I didn’t WIN, but that’s cool because we were told all four of us wrote very respectable pieces. :)

It’s exciting to have a piece performed by a traditional ensemble!

Advance to current

Those of you who are subscribed to this blog (what, there’s 3 of you?  How many of those are actually me?) have pined away at a grayed-out blog title on your RSS reader for far too long.  It’s making me uncomfortable.  So!  I’m going to pick up with more zath tunes and maybe, eventually, advance to current (i.e. put up snippets of things I’m working on now).

Summertime Class

I took a Computer Music composition class last summer where we learned about MAX/MSP and digital multitrack stuff.  Here’s what I wrote for two assignments.

Lies

The assignment was to take a couple of recorded samples and fiddle with them in MAX/MSP.  I used a vocal sample with a famous (?) quotation and a bell-like percussion sound.  All the fiddling was done with commands and envelopes, so it was the playback that was affected and not the actual sample.  What’s that called, non-destructive? 

Wetworks

Wetworks used a lot of modified samples jammed together.  I kind of fell in love with the AT&T text-to-speech generator and made use of it for the background sound of hard-to-discern talking.  Vocoded.  There’s also underwater sounds made from pouring water into a cup and then slowing it down to 1/16th its normal speed.  And my long-suffering Roland XP-80 that I lusted after for nearly a decade and then proceeded to ignore… provides a sample!

The teacher said “it sounds really wet, did you make this wearing headphones?”  (lots of post-processing) Well, in my opinion, wet… works (see what I did there?) so long as you’re wearing headphones when you play it back.

What else is new?

There are some other projects in the works.  I was selected as one of four composition students to write a piece for the New Music Ensemble.  I was also working on a piece last term for oboe with Nintendo accompaniment.  They still need work before they’re ready to present, so I’ll get to it and upload more things to listen to ASAP.  Enjoy these two oddities for now.

What I’ve been working on.

autocracy

zath_autocracy.mp3

18-Nov-2008 02:44

2.6M

Wrote it during the summer, it’s weird like the other stuff from around the same time.  (ignore that date stamp, I just edited the id3 tag.  Should be something like June 2008).

Oh, almost forgot to mention: it loops!

Musicnerd VGM

So a friend of mine emailed me last night and said “Please make a 20th century style Nintendo piece” and then mentioned a ton of genres that the game should fill such as adventure / action / puzzle / survival horror / RPG / FPS / MMO etc.

20th Century, eh? Like the nerdiest, difficult listening music. Set theory, 12-tone rows..

So! Cutting to the chase, I stayed up a few hours past my bedtime and made a 12-tone row Nintendo piece. I call it  NINTENROW.

(ah, hahaha.)

Anyway, it’s an overworld/area map and then it steps into pause mode, and then battle mode… and a little victory ditty before going back to the overworld/area map.

I used the following row: C F D# G# A# G D A B E F# C#
and its inversions and retrogrades.

I feel so nerdy right now, it’s awesome.

It’s a weird song.

So today I made something weird!

zath_EsamNaesQuaSneoq.mp3

18-Jun-2008 18:50

5.0

Mostly used my keyboard (roland xp-80) and a voice sample from the AT&T text to speech operator.

Economic Stimulus

I got a Zoom H2 portable recording device.

So, to celebrate, I took part in the optional assignment for Composition class which was to write something “Electronic”. By Electronic, they meant something in the classical sense (like Musique Concrete, using sound effects and bits of random recordings and no real tonality to speak of).

zath_E_Tore_Be_Ye_Ten.mp3

28-May-2008 02:30

3.1M

So it’s like a bunch of crazy sfx that I recorded, arranged in a way that probably only makes sense to me.

Eggshell

zath_eggshell.mp3

07-May-2008 23:06

1.7M

“Whoever heard of an eggshell sending a distress call?” she demanded. “There has to be a transmitter somewhere, it stands to reason.”

Why should you stand to reason? It didn’t make sense. Why didn’t you lie down to reason? So much more sensible. Rests the cerebellum. He was just about to remark on the fact when he realized that Romana was gone. Searching for the transmitter, no doubt.

Still, why shouldn’t an eggshell transmit a distress call? Particularly if it was broken.

Something along the lines of Monday but with more sounds I made instead of all sounds I sampled.