Thursday 2nd May 2012 – Dinner Party Soundscapes

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Jay

Retail outlets, film and television, nightclubs and many other organisations all use music to help bolster a certain kind of mood. Film composers accent emotions that directors are trying to convey and may also contribute to the film’s styling; high-street retail outlets create an atmosphere corresponding to their brand image and also use music to help you part with money. Music is only half the story though, and in fact, could be arguably less than half. Music comes under the banner of sound, and non-musical sound can also be used to create unique atmospheres on it’s own, as well as in conjunction with musical sentiments.

Last week, The Deptford Project asked if I would like to create a soundscape for a ticketed dinner party, held last Friday evening in their train carriage cafe. My association with The Deptford Project started when I approached them about Secret Soundtrack and another site-specific project. The person in charge, Rebecca, was happy to be involved in these projects and I was delighted that she would want me to create another soundscape for her.

But what is a soundscape and what is the point of them? A soundscape is basically an immersive audio atmosphere and this could be natural or created for a specific purpose. For example, the bedroom, lounge or office that you are currently sitting in has it’s own soundscape: you may hear the hum of your computer, traffic outside, muffled noise from a TV in the next room, birds tweeting outside and a whole host of other sounds that you may only notice when you sit and intently listen. Sound is all around us, even if we only hear the the sound of our own ears working (this is what silence sounds like to a human).

You may also be curious as to the significance or point of recognising these areas of sound though. From a physiological and psychological viewpoint, our emotions and therefore our life experiences are connected to our senses, which means that different soundscapes can affect us in different ways. For example, you may have heard anecdotes about city dwellers that cant sleep when they visit the countryside, as it is too quiet; or maybe you have experienced the sound of grass being cut outside in that seemingly lightweight spring air. Have a think about how such sounds make you feel and you will realise how useful they could be.

The use of music, as mentioned above attempts to tap into this reservoir of human experience and in a similar way, so do artificial soundscapes. But in various ways, soundscapes are also superior to music: the politics of taste, genre affiliation and pseudo-academia are left outside which leaves room for the listener to just experience and be affected. Of course, certain types of emotion and sensation may not be enjoyed as much as others but they each have their use. But of course, we cannot just forget music or it’s obvious power to affect us in it’s own unique way; it is part of the application of sound.

The hosts at The Deptford Project wanted to create an immersive experience for their diners based on natural produce and the countryside, so it was requested that I create a relaxing nature soundscape to help bolster the concept. For this, I created a journey through various different countryside scenarios to give a sense of journey and add richness to the experience. The spaces that the sounds travelled through were central to the piece as each space evokes a different feeling: being in a forest feels different to being in the open field, and the noises occurring within these spaces work with the memory to produce these feelings. Of course, birds singing and trees swaying in a gentle breeze are evoking on their own, but setting them in a space adds so much more depth and emotion to the experience. I also included a couple of ‘occurrences’ in the soundscape to create possible talking points which I envisioned could contribute to a dinner party. Also, as with music, dynamics (or loudness) played a large part in the journey. Some parts were barely audible whilst other parts became louder whilst still knowing their place as background sounds. Again, I added this dimension to contribute to the richness of the overall experience and to help the social situation continually renew itself, which can be so important in a dinner party situation.

If you would like to know more about these ideas, or would like something similar for your own dinner party or event, it would be great to hear from you.

Click here to experience my nature soundscape.

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A Soundscape will contribute towards your event being an unforgettable experience. It could also be used to enhance your sensory branding to ensure that guests will think of you after they have left your event. Contact me for further information and read about past projects below.

If my work in soundscape for events, sound design for film or composing interests you join my mailing list to find out more.

Thursday 8th March 2012 – Working With What’s Natural

Posted on March 8, 2012 by Jay

If you saw somebody suspiciously loitering around on trains the other day in the London Bridge area, then you can put your mind at rest; it wasn’t a terrorist, it was me trying to get some decent recordings of what it sounds like to be in a train carriage while it’s on the move. This was for a project I’m working on at the moment which should be on display when the weather gets a bit warmer. More about this as things progress though…

However, the focus of this post is more on the fact that I was trying to get a ‘decent’ recording rather than working with what the recording was for. I was walking through carriages, getting off trains and getting on others without them even moving and was looking quite suspicious at the same time probably! I was behaving like this as I would get on a carriage and there would be somebody talking on their phone, or coughing a lot; and I got off of one train because a whole class of young children were noisily clambering aboard. Not very good if I wanted the uninterrupted recording of the train moving but this is all part of field recording; it is very difficult to get a clean recording of anything in it’s natural habitat as there is always so much else going on at the same time.

This behaviour has come from a perceived need to get only what I set out for. Anything else is seen as impure and incorrect and therefore I pained to get what I had come for. But when I thought about it, this wasn’t right… I had come to get a natural recording but ended up trying to shape this recording into something very un-natural: a train without passengers; the truth of what I was aiming to capture shouldnt be covered up.

This all seems fairly obvious, but I have noticed things in music recordings that have annoyed me of late: an acoustic guitar with too much high frequency (or treble) to make it ‘sparkle’, turning up the high frequency on the various instruments in a metal recording to aid clarity, compressing music so much that all dynamic range disappears so it sounds louder (which is generally perceived as better). All of these examples are trying to squeeze a foot into a shoe that just doesn’t quite fit. Auto-Tune is another great example as a tool to allow non-singers to sing. Click here for a mastering engineer’s thoughts on this. They do manage to make it fit but at what cost? The nice woody quality of the acoustic guitar was destroyed, the metal sounded thin and overly compressed music sounds more unnatural and is actually more fatiguing to listen to. Of course, the nature of mixing musical instruments means that they do have to be tweaked a little from time to time, but it seems some people out there like to go a bit too far.

I’m not saying that all recordings should be imperfect or sloppy but do you remember those recordings from the 50′s and 60′s (and earlier) that sometimes had a little imperfection in them? A drum not quite hit properly, or a musician deviating from the tempo a little bit. We are human, so mistakes happen and these little ‘mistakes’ add so much to the character of the music, even changing the feel of the song for the better. Also, the world isn’t nicely ordered to suit us. The world happens around us all of the time and any art that we create is a reflection of this. It should not be showing off for the sake of showing off or pristine as we think it will make more money this way, it should record life and not cover it up. This also goes for the way we live our lives: covering up reality and truth can quite easily be the cause of being led down the wrong path not to mention the confusion and extra effort it causes to get things done properly. Do the right thing and stay true! If you can’t do this you probably should be adapting what you are doing…But then, it really does depend on what your goals are! But anyway, the moral here is: why cover up the blunders you make when you could embrace them, integrate them and use them to make yourself stronger?

Thursday 26th January 2012 – The Pier

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Jay

Fast Tube by Casper

Here is a short animation by Jason Bennett for which I have recently finished an alternative sound design for. ‘The Pier’ is a beautifully creative and dark animation that speaks further than it’s basic plot. The characters are outlandish and strange but also emit a certain familiarity. The setting evokes a sense of civilisation but also a sense of the power and domination of nature over this. Throughout these aspects, an attention to detail and aesthetic creates a backdrop of beauty which the message and the story, in all it’s discomfort, rests against.

From the film, you can see that desolation is common through-out: the overall setting is bleak; the grass is caught up in an uncomfortable breeze; and the pier itself is in a state of disrepair. I wanted to reflect this with background noise and sparse use of music; the main musical (Cello) theme, used at the beginning and end, being a reflection of this desolation.

The main character is humanoid, bird-like and exotic whilst the monster character is stealthy, exotic and (initially) seen as closer to nature due to its juxtaposition with the main character. This meant that the main character needed a bird-like voice and was to be represented by an exotic instrument (Esraj, an Indian string instrument) . For the monster I chose delicate sounds to represent it and therefore the delicate sound of the recorder-like Shakuhachi from Japan as it’s musical theme (also, the playing techniques used give an air of the sinister). However, it is fair to say that these instruments are only exotic to the non-Asian but due to the obvious parallels between our main character and Man I didn’t let this worry me. To be truly outlandish and exotic to all I could have warped the sounds and also maybe used some kind of micro-tonal scale.

Because I saw both characters as being a part of nature, caught up in it’s endless cycle, I decided to bring them both together at the end by bringing their musical themes together; and to show that they are both part of the desolation that nature has created, these themes are both used in conjunction with the Cello theme at the pinnacle of the film. You may think that my use of the word ‘desolate’ in relation to nature is not fitting but nature creates desolation as well as beauty and the former is prevalent through-out the film (anybody that thinks only Man creates desolation should consider if Man is a part of nature or if there is an opposite pole of which Man is created).

To make the atmosphere of the film as realistic as possible, I added audio detail to compliment the visual detail and used sounds that reflected what was going on rather than using them to bring attention to the narrative. The exception here is the noise coming form inside the main character’s belly: this had to be disturbing and ‘in your face’ to get the main point of the film across, not just to be gross! The main chracter’s voice also gave an opportunity to try to induce this realism. For this, I didn’t use a bird sound as I wanted to tie the creature in with human emotion. Instead, I recorded myself making straining noises (insert joke here) and manipulated them with filters to get the desired effect. This meant that the emotion behind the noises remained intact even though the character of the sound had changed.

Below, I have included a link to a scanned copy of my original (rather messy) notes that I made prior to starting the project, set out as the animation’s timeline. Have a look to get a more detailed idea of my thoughts regarding the interplay between the different aspects and themes within the film (any non-highlighted sections beyond the first two boxes are yellow – this doesn’t scan well!). Please do feel free to comment on this post to tell me what you think of my version and you can also click here to see/hear the original with wonderfully atmospheric music made by James Slater.

The Pier – Notes

Thursday 24th November 2011 – Sound, Architecture and Environment

Posted on November 24, 2011 by Jay

The odd thing about recording is that your end product, the music, isn’t exactly real… it is a process that allows replication of something that has gone on before: The music etc is played live and a snapshot is taken. Also, you may know that the recording process cannot capture every single aspect of what the sound was like when you took that ‘snapshot’. Current technology is very good at trying to emulate the original sound and you could argue that it does it so well that the imperfections are not even noticed, especially to the non-musician.

However, there are aspects of live music that the face-value capture of sound encapsulates with great difficulty. Think about listening to a great busking band on the street. You have the excitement of stumbling upon the performance; the personalities of the performers as they interact with the crowd, verbally and with their instruments; the collective experience of being part of a crowd; your own state of mind, if you are on holiday for example; and all of the sounds and feelings associated with these aspects. Then there are the more physical aspects: the way the sound of the different instruments reverberate around the buildings (even depending on where each musician is sitting), the qualities of that reverberation (imagine the difference in sound of a cathedral to your living room); other sounds working with/against the music intentionally or otherwise; even the state of the air could influence the total experience. You then buy a copy of the band’s CD as the experience was so wonderful but, although the CD may sound good, it just isn’t the same.

The total experience (the actual music added to these aspects missing from the CD) is atmosphere (which I go on about all of the time!) and modern recording technologies can even go a long way to accounting for this; think about those realistic reverbs for example. To my mind, maybe a change in focus is what’s needed to get closer to this elusive ‘atmosphere’. When recording, maybe don’t think of it as recording music; or even as recording a performance. Maybe think about the process as recording an experience. This combined with keeping an open mind about what you can use to achieve this may produce even stronger results. Music in particular tries to reproduce the thoughts and feelings of the song-writer using abstract methods (communicating with a guitar is very different from talking!), so why not extrapolate this to the whole process rather than just the sound-making? You could even take this to the extreme by reproducing the atmosphere of a performance without actually including the instrument being used, although this would be a little silly if you are recording a virtuoso violinist because they are technically brilliant, for example! Obviously, the balance of sound reproduction and atmosphere would have more real-life applications…

So, that finally brings me to the more overt topic of this post. Architecture could be said to be one of the unsung heroes of the life experience. We take it for granted that buildings, trees, and the rest of our surroundings are ‘just there’ but as any architect will tell you, these surroundings mold our lives and our life experience/atmosphere. Therefore if we are thinking about the recording of music as above, it follows that we should take time to notice how sound interacts with the spaces it is immersed in. This could go further than just putting the sounds in a reverb that emulates the space, and many musicians work with furthering this idea (for example Gustav Holst tried to describe the planets of our solar system in his music ‘The Planets’ using an orchestra; The band The Gathering used samples of crowd noises and street noises in their album ‘If Then Else’ to manipulate the atmosphere).

Thinking about how sounds interacts with architecture or the environment may not lead to placing sounds in a space as such, but it may also deepen an understanding of sound by looking into it’s real-life behaviour, which could loosen-up a musician’s perspective and therefore increase creativity. For example, watch this you-tube video of a fantastic sound-art installation and see what you learn…

http://youtu.be/Ve6PTrlLGOU

Also, think about the application of sound within the architectural field. Have a read here for some actual buildings/projects that have been designed to work within an environment that takes sound into account. A couple use fountains to put up a mask of ‘white noise’ (which contains sound from all frequencies- i.e. the ‘snow’ on blank analogue TV channels) to cover traffic noise; a classroom was also designed to reduce spill of outside noise whilst emphasising the frequencies that the human voice occupies; raised portions and physical barriers evade noise and different materials sound differently when walked on. Related to this, there are companies out there that design sound for business, taking every sound made within the company’s remit a part of their brand i.e. you wouldn’t use a noisy, clangy metallic floor in a shop that specialises in massage or meditation.

Of course, this is a two-way street as well. Musicians and sound recorders can learn from sound in the real world and architects can learn from musical idealism i.e. calming soundscapes may be used in a massage parlour so maybe the building can be constructed in a way to emphasises these sounds.

So, if you are a music fan see if these ideas change the way you listen to music; musicians out there, maybe try thinking about sound differently and see if it enhances your output; and if you are involved in any aspect of creation think about how sound is as much a part of experience as your chosen field is and how careful thought around it can enhance the end product.

Thursday 10th November 2011 – Flying

Posted on November 10, 2011 by Jay

A couple of weeks ago I posted an experiment of mine that involved making some music based on a graphical score that I made for myself. That part of the experiment just explained how I arrived at the graphical score and then showed what it looks like. Among the other bits and pieces Im doing, I finished this experiment (called ‘Flying’) this week and present it here for you to have a listen to, critique and offer suggestions (or anything else for that matter!). I designed a sound for each element and then constructed the piece using these sounds and the score. I deliberately made the music using only the score and what initiated it as reference and did not introduce any further ideas that I may have had (discounting the subconscious of course!). This was done in an effort to make the transference from idea to score to music as pure as possible as the communication between these stages was the focus of this little experiment. This piece will go into my Dreams project among such tracks as Watching the Stars. Click play below and have a look at the score….

Download:

Thursday 13th October 2011 – Watching the Stars

Posted on October 13, 2011 by Jay

Download:

This week, I have started work on some original bedtime music for children. Those of you that have been reading my blog for a while may know about the EP I released called Bedtime Nursery Rhymes, and this is a follow-on from that. This time, rather than use well-established children’s tunes, I wanted to create something with the same concept of sleep-promotion but with original music and with no association to anything lyrical (to keep the focus on the sounds).

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about the concept I have been using to create sounds and I thought I would talk about my first go at creating this new bedtime music using these ideas. This track was started with just the name ‘Watching the Stars’ which, as you can see, provided me with two concepts: the idea of watching (stars), and the stars themselves.

I started off by creating the stars, as this would be most obvious and could lead to other ideas. I needed a sparkly, shiny sound; which I translated as high-pitched, pure with some kind of quick, defined attack (note onset). The initial sound would also fade quickly but echo as well as move across the soundscape randomly with varying strengths (some stars are brighter than others!). My synth of choice seems to be Logic’s Sculpture at the moment so I created this sound (along with the others used) using that.

Next, I looked at ‘watching’ and ‘watching stars’ in particular. From this I gathered a sense of space, in terms of being outside (better than watching under glass I think!) as well as the enormity of outer-space; a sense of wonder and amazement; and a sense of calm. As another issue, I realised that the piece would need some kind of melody to make it listenable, although this shouldn’t be too catchy or strong as these factors could impede relaxing and sleep. Having some kind of melody would also serve the second concept of ‘watching’. This is because a melody moves and gives a sense of movement and this is exactly what happens when you scan any particular scene; your eyes move as well as the thoughts accompanying them.

The initial melody I used, although calming, didn’t go anywhere and the monotony it created was far from creating the sense of wonder that I wanted, although the intended meditative affect was there. Thankfully, Sculpture has a great envelope function that allows you to change the character of the sound over time which adds some variation as well as a sense of ‘something bigger’. I also thought that things would need to be randomised a little to enhance the feeling of the enormity and again, ‘something bigger’. To do this I accompanied the main, varying melody with other notes created using a slight variation of the same synth sound and made them bolster the main melody but also to confuse it a little.

The final part of the puzzle was to ground the whole piece in a physical space. This was done using reverberation as usual, but also by using a backdrop of sound that I had recorded whilst in Italy over the summer. This is the sound of crickets that I had recorded near Rocco on the Italian Riviera which I trimmed to give a clean file that would seamlessly loop. The recording wasn’t perfect though as there was a bit of wind and rumble from cars, so I just cut out all of the low frequencies. As the noises that crickets make aren’t in the same range as low rumbles, this didn’t compromise the audio too much and it is generally the high frequencies in sound that give you the sense of space that I required. You will notice that the cricket noises aren’t very loud at all and that’s because I didn’t really want the cricket noises as such, but a sense of the atmosphere that the sounds were created in. To achieve this as subtly as possible, I made sure that the noises of the crickets were loud enough to be just heard, but when taken out left the whole piece feeling emptier. Of course, the actual character of the cricket noises do add a lot to the feel of the piece but I feel the setting deserved more attention than this subject matter.

Well, here it is below. Press play to have a listen and let me know what you think! I aim to create other pieces like this for the same concept but using other themes over the next few weeks.

Download:

Thursday 29th September 2011 – What is Musical Atmosphere and how do you Create it?

Posted on September 29, 2011 by Jay

Atmosphere is something that I often refer to so I thought I would try to explain this abstract term in relation to my interests. Many musicians are expert at manipulating atmosphere but many don’t even try so I thought I’d give my opinions and ideas. If you look at a dictionary definition it will tell you that atmosphere is a pervading tone or mood but I’m a little conscious that this is a bit vague when referring to music/sound.

In terms of creating a convincing, all-enveloping atmosphere that transports the listener I think that it is helpful to expand the above definition. An atmosphere is an intricate network of various emotions and senses that are tightly knit together, sometimes so much so that the overall effect gives no clue to what it is composed of. Because of this, creating an atmosphere by working backwards from a general feeling may produce very bland results i.e. just filling a happy song full of happy melodies/chord.

To effectively transport the listener into the song or music, a deeper understanding of the happy situation is needed. The best way to achieve this is to try to affect as many senses as possible and refer to related thoughts and feelings, untangling multiple causes of the atmosphere and deciding their weighting. I also find that it helps to picture the scenario and think about what you can see and/or feel as well as think about what others may see or feel.

To me, the most important aspect of an atmosphere is the space it is contained in because this seems to form a basis of almost any experience (through the filter of experience and emotion, but I’ll come to that). For this reason, I like to start here. Generally, a song or piece of music can have a sense of space when listened to because of the amount and/or type of echo (reverb) added to individual instruments or the whole piece. In many cases, this echo is added for technical reasons to help individual instruments be heard more clearly and to add depth for a bigger sound. In other cases, relevant to this post, it is used specifically for mood such as to enhance emotional vocal lines: the sound of an emotive vocal in a big hall can be very powerful. These days you can use convolution reverb to actually sample real spaces and use your computer to put your recorded audio into these spaces.

If you look at the space you are currently in you will see various objects around, some of them make sounds on their own, others may need a little help… If you are at work and think about making music about it, you could use machinery/technology noises but morph/adapt them to underlying emotions. Emphasising uncomfortable sound frequencies could increase a sense of stress (at work) along with using a rushed timing. You may use the same sounds but soften their sound and transients to make them more calming if your story involves a calm workplace. You may not want to use field-recordings in your music so, to communicate stress, you may play your guitar faster with a strong attack (note onset), and also emphasise those harsh frequencies. For work-related stress, you may also play with a mechanical, repetitive feel or even mirror the sounds of machinery/technology present. To soften this you may slow your playing down, manipulate the sound to get a warmer (bass-influenced) feel or layer it with a soothing instrument like a string orchestra.

There will always be more sensations though, such as experience or other emotions, as life just isn’t that simple. If you are at work, you may have an underlying sense of stress and also relief of being able to joke around. You may have a sense of pride or despair; or you may experience excitement and longing if you met your husband/wife there. Conveying the overall feeling may be hard without breaking this atmosphere into it’s parts. Of course, lyrics can convey these ideas but this wont work for instrumentals and if there are vocals wouldn’t the experience be far more intense if the instrumentation strengthened their effect? To create an overwhelming sense of being placed right inside the music’s subject matter, dissect the elements of the atmosphere you are experiencing and find sounds/themes/ideas for each aspect.

There are also more aspects you can reference; atmosphere also contains the perceptions of the people in the space, or have been in it, along with your own possibly unique viewpoint. These interactions may be a central theme but hard to convey from a general perspective so all these aspects could have sounds or themes. You could layer physical themes with references from personal experience or common sense to create your whole; obscuring the sounds may give the impression of dreaming or forgetfulness; you could use different sounds, instruments, styles of playing or different sound treatments to represent different people. The way the themes interact with each other in your ‘physical landscape’ can also be manipulated. Are they in harmony? Are they fighting? Are they working together to solve something?

Well, here are a few ideas of how the atmosphere in music can be intensified (in my opinion!). You may want to do this to make your music more convincing and substantial or you may be exploring sound and it’s relation to the human experience but either way have fun and use these ideas, if new to you, to open up a whole new universe of inspiration. If you have any thoughts or ideas on these ideas please feel free to comment below.

My first experiment into using atmosphere in this way, using synth, is Bedtime Nursery Rhymes. My next venture along these lines, using ‘found sound’, is Some London Life; go over and take a look!

Thursday 22nd September, 2011 – Colourscape at Clapham Common

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Jay

Last weekend, I had the pleasure of experiencing the Colourscape music festival (You Tube video below). For those that haven’t heard of it Colourscape is a giant tent of interconnected nodules of different colour that you can go inside of and explore. The different colours change the colour of the light coming into the structure, whether natural or otherwise. There is also a large silver-coloured chamber in the middle where music is performed, the speakers for which are located throughout the whole structure (although performers can also play on the move wondering around the structure). The idea is to use Colourscape’s unique environment to influence the performance and music to create a sensory experience that envelopes the audience. As my regular readers may have realised creating atmosphere is one of my main interests, so when I found out about Colourscape, I had to experience it. Click here to have a look at their website, which includes pictures of the set-up in case my explanation isnt clear enough!

As I entered, the vocal ensemble Juice performed some gorgeously atmospheric a cappella pieces full of luscious harmonies and a while later Consortium5 performed. If you have read my post on this year’s Truck festival you may notice that I saw Consortuim5 with a handful of other people whilst drinking some of a friend’s lethal home-made elderflower champaigne. They are a recorder quintet that play some very interesting experimental-type compositions. This time around, they started with some more traditional compostions and then ventured into their more modern approach; and later on performed avant garde pieces together with Juice.

Wondering around Colourscape does feel like an adventure; various coloured chambers beckon you from all directions with your current mood guiding your path. There are intense red, green, blue and yellow chambers as well as a couple of very dark black ones; each effecting you more intensely than you can imagine. Colours also spill out and mix together to form other colours, especially into the neutral silver chambers, leaving you with a surreal atmosphere that seems to heighten your senses as well as wash calm over you. The other people also inside become part of the atmosphere, wearing coloured capes provided by the staff, aimlessly wondering along with their excited chatter.

The experience of this is intensified and enriched by the music being played. At first, you cannot tell where the music is coming from; you wonder around in a colour-bathed daze whilst sound floats around you prompting exploration. This is the feeling most interesting to me: the space is enclosed and the surfaces are reverberant so voices, the sound of excited children and the music bounce around giving a very dream-like echoic experience; the more ethereal music works very well in this respect. The more interpretative sounds were more interesting though: certain colours jar your senses in varying degrees whilst others influence you to just sit down and stare; and the marriage of Juice and Consortium5 expressing these differences tied my senses together and put me on the road to total immersion.

The whole experience was quite indulgent but also I learned a lot about what can be done with space and control over an atmosphere. Ideas about what I could do with this spaces crept into my thoughts; ideas about creating a journey influenced by the different feelings inside of the chambers and disorienting the audience to such an extent that re-adjusting to the outside again may become just as shocking. Over time, I’ll have a deeper think about these ideas and may even approach the makers of Colourscape to compete for the yearly commission they give. I’ve got plenty to do as it is at the moment but I feel very excited about this prospect…

This year’s Colourscape music festival is running until 25th September on Clapham Common and costs £8 per person for an hour or so. It is well worth it so do go and experience it!

Fast Tube by Casper

Thursday 2nd June 2011 – Rebirth

Posted on June 2, 2011 by transientmusic

It’s funny how things turn out sometimes. After something like 3 years half of the members of the band I formed, Lunar Rising, decided to leave recently. They didn’t all go at once but the reason behind it was the same: They decided that work should come first and they couldn’t be sure they could commit in the future if things got more serious.

After the last exodus, when the band pretty much collapsed, I can’t say I was surprised. We have gone through countless musicians in audition and various other band members that generally left because of that same reason. It follows that it’s not so weird some founding members treat their lives in the same way; in any case we all do really, just in different ways.

I mentioned that it’s funny how things turn out, and I say this because I have a growing interest in sound design and regular readers will have read bits and pieces about that. I envisioned a while back how the future of the band may sound and look; I have talked about creating unique shows, and creating atmospheres in a live situation as well as a recorded situation. As you may have read, I have recently got my hands on some new gear which allows me to experiment with these ideas, but I always thought the band wouldn’t be ready to take these ideas on-board for a long while. It’s quite a happy coincidence that this growth in interest has occurred now that I am building the band up again with the other two remaining members. And another happy coincidence in that it means we can sound just as huge without packing a stage out with eight people. The three of us that are left have expressed our dedication to our project and we all now have more control over how it progresses. We do also have a violin player interested in joining us too and things there seem hopeful but unlike before, our new setup will allow us to adapt if history does repeat itself.

So, I have talked about how my ideas are colliding and about the advantages of this new setup but I haven’t actually talked about how this will actually work. With my main interests being in sound design and atmosphere, this will be the core of what I base the band around. Using a laptop computer and my guitar synth, I have a huge range of sounds at my disposal, and these sounds can all be tailored to satisfy an aspect of each song. In the same way as I have created a sound for an aspect of a picture, I will now be able to design a sound based on the sentiment and story of a song. The computer will also give me power to loop phrases I play and sounds I produce but don’t be fooled into thinking that the computer will do all the work: The phrases can be played live and looped to play continuously and then cut out and brought back in as needed. All the while this will free me up to work on producing another sound or phrase or even change instruments… This will require careful planning in terms of timing and how many jobs I give myself to do at any one time but the sense of build-up and going from small sounds to huge layered soundscapes will be a natural by-product of having to do one thing at a time. Of course, this all has to be done under the glare of venue lights on a stage where, if anything can go wrong it will, as the old adage goes. This will mean that I will be forced to concentrate more, to be more prepared and to not drink so much beer… All good things to get used to!

The new sounds will include synth sounds that I have designed for specific purposes but will also include sounds that I have recorded out and about on my handheld recorder (Roland’s R-09HR); this will allow the final product to be cohesive in terms of atmosphere and concept. These sounds can be adapted and/or warped to lend themselves to the particular song in creation depending on how subtle I want their core make-up to be. Also, elements of the sounds may find more aesthetic or functional uses, making them contribute to melodies or rhythms far removed from their intended concept.

Of course, this band won’t be just me; singer, Dominique Allan and drummer Pavel Stanev are still on-board (hopefully along with a new violin player). Being a smaller, more tight-knit unit this means that we can all work on creating the sounds and sections beyond our respective instruments without confusion or over-doing things. Being a fan of Bjork, Dom brings similar ideas to my own to the project and you will know what I mean if you are familiar with Bjork’s work. Pav loves to push the boundaries and experiment; and being a musician that works on feeling rather than notation and dull, well-rehearsed standards he has an ability to transpose his ideas from instrument to instrument.

Before, the previous incarnation of Lunar Rising worked towards making atmospheric music that contained a sense of journey. This will still prevail but now the band will be much more focussed on the end product as our relationships are more fully defined by ambition and the ways we will achieve this are also more fully defined. Of course, who knows what may happen to disrupt this in the future but all I can say is that the intention is now fully lodged in my mind and somehow I will make sure these ideas are made concrete…

Thursday 18th May 2011 – ‘This week I have mostly been…’

Posted on May 19, 2011 by transientmusic

This past couple of weeks has seen the entry of my newest bit of kit into my arsenal of music-making tools and it should be all I need for quite a while! Last week I received my Roland GR-55 guitar synth as well as my East-West Quantum Leap Symphonic Orchestra sample library. The EWQL stuff is actually being sold as ‘by-one-get-one-free until the end of May (2011) so I took advantage of this and ordered the Ra library too, which is a rather cool library of ethnic instruments from around the world (get in touch if you want the link). On their website, you can have a listen to music made with these libraries if y0u follow the links and I aim to post my own couple of exploratory pieces on here next week. If you have a listen to the music, I’m sure you will agree that the results are truly amazing; a computer is playing the music!

The guitar synth also allows me to play samples such as the EWQL stuff and synth contained in my computer like you would with any midi keyboard. If you are unfamiliar with midi think of the cheap Casio keyboard you may have had when younger and it’s ability to change sounds at the touch of a button. Then imagine this replicating instruments in a way that is actually realistic (amongst other technical extras) and you have a good idea what I can now do with my guitar; as you can imagine, the world of synth and sampling is very limited to somebody that cant play a keyboard so I had to save up for the guitar equivalent. Like in those role-playing computer games, I feel like I have opened up a a huge oaken door with a giant gold key after traversing many puzzles and hazards. The room behind the door is so huge that I can’t see the walls and much of it is dimly lit so I can only just make some things out, whilst small spotlights highlight some other wonderful things in all their glory. Pretty cool.

The first task I gave myself with these new toys was to finish off some music I offered to make a friend for their home video. It was mainly images of architecture old and new with other scenic highlights from a trip abroad which allowed me to really inject all the drama I love so much when creating music (well, maybe I over-did the drama a tad, but I’m allowed to get excited eh! …and who can resist the chance of using ‘Wagnerian tubas’ when presented with pictures of the Reichstag!)

This previous piece was mostly written before I had the sample libraries so it turned out to be a mixture of synth from Logic Studio and orchestral sounds. Next, it was time to have a go at something solely using the orchestra but I decided to keep it simple. So, after work on Tuesday I spent a couple of hours making a short piece (and learning to use the software!). It was based on an idea of confused action and movement which manages to resolve itself in strength before making a swift exit. The next piece I will try this week will be something a little more melancholic and I will post whatever I come up with next week.

As well as now being able to play at orchestration on my guitar, my interests in synth and abstract sounds are also blossoming. For a while now I have talked a little about the project I am working on with photographer Lesley Flower and now I have an instrument I can use more intuitively I started work on a second piece. For those that don’t know, the idea here is an experiment in atmosphere which will create a series of audio/visual pieces using Lesley’s photographs as a starting point for sound. The sound will be designed in such a way as to enhance the overall experience although both elements will work together. I spoke a bit more about it in my post ‘Audio/Visual Work and the Importance of Calm Thought’ back in September. Anyway, my first incursion into this with my more intuitive instrument was Sunday evening…

The picture in question is an angled shot of raindrops on glass, some in focus, other parts out of focus; all very characteristic of Lesley’s work. The main backdrop of the shot contains various shades of a soft grey and I took this as my main starting point, creating a backdrop which I felt echoed the the soft and calm effect the colours had on me. For the next layer, I decided to widen the atmosphere and throw in a few obvious references to the subject matter by spreading different types of ‘droplet’ and ‘pitter-patter’ noises across the soundscape. Some close, some far away; some more ethereal in nature, some more blunt. I then sat back with my headphones on and had a listen to what I had created whilst looking at the print. It was an OK backdrop but as my eyes wondered around the print there were aspects that I had missed. Firstly, some water droplets were in really sharp focus and their bulging appearance also had a light sheen on them. Also, parts of the print were fuzzy in terms of focus which left a feeling of wonder even though I was well aware what the haze covered. To bring a sense of focus to these points which a wondering eye my touch, I found that a very deep bass with a slow attack time gave a ‘gloopy’ enough sound and I combined this with a slight high-pitched sheen; I then combined them by giving them the same compression treatment and a nice and muddy (ie not clear) reverberation (echo to give a sense of space – muddy to try to blur the differences between the two sounds a little). I then spread these ‘rain droplets’ around various positions throughout the stereo field and made them intermittent enough so that their occurrence might seem like a discovery every now and then. To blur passages, I used parts of the same sequence of the ‘droplets’ with a series of distortions heavy on low mid sound frequencies. These sounds were mixed into the original ‘raindrops’ to make it seem like those particular parts ware blurred.

In other news, the future of my band Lunar Rising is in doubt after one of us asked the rest about their commitment level. We were then left two members down and that particular member being unsure if they could continue also. It’s safe to say though that I’ll make sure Lunar Rising lives on in some way. I had started to develop bringing in my new guitar synth into stage performance to heighten the whole experience, and I cant let that idea go to waste!

This month’s Henry Spencer Project post was the first prose-only post for this project. My original idea was for the blog to be based around a fictional character who likes to hang around with a band but I ended up toning this idea down as it felt like I would be taking on too much work! Henry Spencer makes brief appearances during music posts but as I would still like to embellish the project with other bits of information I felt I would like to explore his character a little bit to help create an all-round experience….

Well, that’s this week. Until next time!