ZATH BLOG
Starbuild-tape
At the end of last term I was hard pressed to finish writing a 4-movment sonata for cello and laptop. Long story short, I have something to upload!
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zath_starbuild-tape.mp3 | 17-Jul-2009 23:13 | 2.2M |
It’s the “tape-part” for the second movement of the sonata. The sonata as a whole was called “Take It Back” and investigated the idea of being able to reverse your decisions. Kinda like Braid, I guess, but far less developed an idea. This movement is the “Oh, Hey, I Can Reverse Time” moment of the piece. Or something.
It was created using sampled sounds from my viola, mostly me tapping on it or swishing my bow in the air. There were also tones from the viola or a piano, manipulated by a neato program called HyperUpic. There was some additional jiggery-pokery in a program called SoundHack.
It’s… ambient? And it’s about two-and-a-half minutes long. Really it’s a wash of sound that belongs behind a cello. Someday I’ll get a good recording of the rest of the piece and put the complete version online too.
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.
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 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 voices. 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.