With the first recordings set to run all afternoon tomorrow at the Sydney Conservatorium, I’ve made a temporary cover for the scores and parts, and they’re looking great, especially with the mix of traditional notation, the Feldman-esque grids, and instructions for synthesis and sampling.
Once the project has launched and I have some time, I’ll commission a graphic designer to do a proper cover for the CD and the score…
Most of the music to be recorded with Ensemble Offspring is now either drafted or completely finished, and despite that it has been 18 months since this project started, it still feels like there’s an awful lot to do. I made myself feel a bit better today by making a “to-do” list, and actually everything is under control. The brand new Warships Pavilion on beautiful Darling Harbour is looking close to completion, too!
There are 10 days to go until the first recording, and the list looks manageable:
Of course, there will still be lots of work to do after the recordings – preparing two versions of each recording, one for the installation so that MOD’s procedural player can make constantly-changing sound, and some shortened versions for a CD as a record of the project for myself and the museum. But that’s easy compared to finishing off the composition/sound design and recording it!
Well, the tender for the installation has been awarded to MOD Productions, which is wonderful news for me. MOD were the creative and technical minds behind the incredible ACO Virtual that allowed visitors to interact with a virtual performance by performers from the Australian Chamber Orchestra.
Today we had our first production meeting and all of a sudden the installation feels like it’s very soon! So I need to complete my sketching and work out a timeline for the recording.
MOD have some really clear new ideas about interactivity, which is great for me. There will be an opportunity to create some multi-track electro-acoustic pieces and have the tracks cued by sensors in the installation – for instance to respond to the presence of a person, the touch of a button, or a sound that is made.
It does look like the hardware budget is no longer going to stretch to the surround sound that I was hoping to compose for – at least in key spaces – but at least this is balanced by new creative and technical aspirations. The incredible Michela Ledwidge is coding a bespoke interaction system to be installed on the vessels, so I can’t wait to put it through its paces!
“DJ Sasha at Arenele Romane, Bucharest (2006)”. The original uploader was Wickethewok at English Wikipedia – Taken on 8 July at Arenele Romane in Bucharest, Romania by Barbu Cristian. Courtesy of Red Light Management. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.
The LiveSchool course tonight taught me two important things. First, that my theoretical understanding of electronic sound synthesis is still pretty up to date (just swap out circuits and knobs for digital emulation and a mouse and all of the same theory still applies), and second that LiveSchool courses are AMAZING and I’m going to learn heaps about Ableton Live, and I’m certain I’ll supplement my existing knowledge about sound design with lots more. The interesting thing is that I’m probably the only “art music” person in the room, with the 7 others writing various genres of popular electronic music, yet the information is useful to us all.
My one takeaway from the night was Adam Maggs’ brilliant demonstration with the Operator instrument of how adding overtones to a fundamental pitch affects the way we perceive the tone of the sound. He began with a fundamental sine wave, and added some overtones – at this point you perceive what he’s doing as a chord – but then he played a short lick with that sound on a MIDI keyboard, and instead of hearing a series of parallel chords, you hear just the fundamental tone, but with all of those overtones having changed the timbre of the pitch. Of course, this wasn’t new theory to me – but I’d never seen it explained so simply and brilliantly. So I came home and captured the process so I could post it here. I actually do it three times, picking different overtones each time, so you can really try and challenge your perception of sound.
This week I’m in residency at the International School of Beijing. Normally on a residency I conduct performances of my own music (often commissioned specially for the occasion) and teach composition and technology to students (often based on the works I’m in residence to conduct, so that my pieces become a model for the students’); but this trip is something completely different, and quite relevant to the Maritime project.
I’m here to teach non-musicians how to write film music. The school has a lot of outstanding film students who can get extra marks for ‘creativity’, so their teachers are encouraging them not to use stock music but to compose their own. Which is difficult if you don’t play an instrument, let alone often write your own music.
So I’ve created an interactive iBook for Mac or iPad which gives students a bunch of ideas, and this is what we’ll be doing in hands-on workshops all week… it’s a good time to think about what the filmic soundtrack in the ICE might look like in the new warships pavilion, too…
Thinking further about the connection between Ensemble Offspring’s live instruments, experimental sounds (imitating sounds of engineering on the vessels), sampled orchestral sounds and synthesis, I’ve decided to sharpen up my 1994-trained (thank you Exeter University) synth skills by taking the LiveSchool sound design course this coming November and December. It’s not cheap, but the last time I did synthesis in more detail than scrolling through presets was on a Minimoog. So as I discussed a few blogs ago, I’m going to combine my desire to become a better user of Ableton Live with some sound synthesis revision – this time virtually with Live’s built-in synthesisers. I did LiveSchool’s Begin short course last year and love the way they teach a small number of users hands-on, so I think this will be really great both technically and creatively…
Here’s a little taster of the kind of event that these guys put on…
Just a quick one today – for anyone interested in learning more about 4d sound. Anyone out there go experience creating surround sound mixes in Ableton Live, Pro Tools or any other DAW? I’d love to hear from you in the comments below!
Today I met with Claire Edwardes and talked about all of my ideas for the project and how I hoped Ensemble Offspring could be involved. Claire seemed to love the idea and is going to go and talk to the rest of the group about it and sort out a quotation for the museum on (1) workshops on board the boat, hopefully meeting with engineers (over this coming summer?); (2) recording acoustic music at the Sydney Conservatorium in our studios which will be overlaid in the final ‘soundtrack’ with any sampled industrial sounds, synthesised sounds and sampled orchestrations (for the ‘filmic’ moments); and (3) perhaps performing some of the more through-composed lines for those instruments live at the launch of the project next year, on the vessels themselves.
This has got me thinking more and more about the instrumentation, as in the entry on 22/8 with the mock-up metallic sounds. Balancing it all is the key – that little piece was quite frenetic, and could be quite overwhelming in a space. In many ways the ‘bareness’ of the texture with four players is more confronting than the wash of a symphony orchestra. I had talked about the idea of creating synthesised sounds to imitate ‘industrial’ sounds, but now I’m thinking that the instruments real metallic sounds can be naked, like that, while synthesised sounds and production can ‘fill in the holes’, giving a consistent listening experience. I may do a little more work on that piece with some synths. Anyway, time to write to Hamish, and tell him about my conversation with Claire.
