Made both of these during/after class to build technique in Finale and Digital Performer. w00t!
Something for Class by matthewsteele
Learning DP 2 by matthewsteele
I don’t think I’ll be uploading everything I do for class to the Soundcloud, but it’s received so little love for the last year or so.
The alternate reality that I inhabit is the one where I don’t get $ quickly enough to join the program this year, and then the program falls through because too many other people have the same problem. I am told that there are plans to try and get the PNWFS certificate program attached to a university of some sort in order to become accredited, so the banks will consider all students as “in-school” and maybe even allow students to obtain federal financial aid. If this happens, I will do my best to go next year!
So! I had that recital I mentioned in my previous post. It was a collection of computer music, a piece for cello and “tape”, a film score, and the bridges piece. I need to revise the film score so it can be recorded and accompany the film on the soundtrack.
Reed and I will be moving to Seattle before September 7, because that’s when the Pacific Northwest Film Scoring program starts. Totally awesome! I’m currently immersed in a world of apartment hunting, which is exciting. I like to think about how this decision would influence a lot of potential outcomes, and therefore would theoretically work as a central point from which several alternate realities spring. But that’s really nerdy so I’ll just ponder that one on my own.
The school itself will be on Mercer Island. We may end up moving into an apartment on the island itself, which is cool. I’ve never lived on an island before (unless you say “This Island Earth” but then that’s less unique because there’s X Billion others in the same boat). The alternative would be to find a place in Seattle or Bellevue and then ride the bike to class, which I would also be fine with. There’s also the question of finding some kind of part-time weekend or evening job to make ends meet.
I recently completed a 4-week class on the history of electronic music. Interesting stuff. My appreciation for cerebral music is increasing, but I think I’ll still be able to handle “that sounds nice”. The class was taught by Christopher Penrose, who is working on a spectral synth for the iPad called Synthtronica.
I’m sure there’s more to say but I’m not sure what it is just yet.
Here’s a youtube video of one of the pieces I presented at my recital:
I feel compelled to write about what I’m up to, compositionally. I think it’s because my friend and fellow composition student, Reed, just posted a recital playlist on his own blog. I am a copycat!
First and foremost is the project I’ve been kind of working on for most of the year: a miniature for each of the bridges that cross the Willamette in Portland. The instrumentation is Violin, Cello, Flute, Clarinet, Piano, and Percussion.
As far as the movements go, Sellwood, Ross Island, Marquam, Hawthorne, Morrison, Burnside, Steel, Broadway, and Fremont are all finished (save some editing). I’m partway through the movement for the 10th bridge, which got me interested in this project in the first place: the BNSF (Burlington Northern Santa Fe) Railway Bridge 5.1, which I didn’t know existed until last summer. Last is the St. Johns movement, whose inspirational bridge is pretty and large, which means the movement should be as well.
Next up is a score for short film. The film is 7:45 or so, and only about 3 minutes of it has any kind of a temp track set up by the director. I’m not sure if that means I should just write music for the parts just with temp track or take the initiative and score the whole thing (something to ask the director). Most likely the film will be projected during my recital, accompanied by live string quartet and piano. Then, this summer, the performers will be recorded for the film’s actual release. Exciting!
Those are the only two “I’m going to do these on my recital for sure” pieces I’ve programmed so far. I have a few other ideas to write between now and then (June 5, come see my recital!)
Some possibilities include:
My target duration is an hour, let’s see if I make it!
In other news, I picked a new theme and title for my blog’s site, which was a very productive waste of time! And I’m thinking about trying to get into a 1-year film scoring certificate program up in Seattle… mostly because Reed said he was going to do it, which is another copycatism (but would be totally awesome).
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.
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.
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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!
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).
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.
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.
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).
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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.
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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.