Iako's Land

When I attended the”Frame Breaking” performance I also learned about binaural Recording. It is a method for recording using microphones that are placed where the human ears are, simulating the way humans hear, so that when it is played back to you (through headphones) you get similar effects than those of a surround speaker system. You can hear the sounds moving in space. It is a truly fantastic experience. Click on the Virtual Barber Shop link to experience it yourselves. Remember to use headphones.

On my second 4 minute piece since my last effort to use acoustic instrument sounds went wrong I decided to do the same thing but this time be more focused and careful with it.

I recorded some sounds of scraping a guitar string and for a contrasting sound to the long sustained scrape I recorded a knock on the guitar’s body. These sounds were my main sources. Then I transformed them using several techniques. I stretched them using the monophonic flex tool which changed the timbre and gave me variations. Also I used the pitch shifter to either turn the sounds to very low frequencies , or just make small call and response between two sounds (example: pitch ascending for a question and descending for an answer). I also retrograded some scrapes and combined them to achieve some sudden rising of volume  and climax. Further more I feel that I made good use of effects like reverb and delay to simulate different room sizes or depth and also contrast with non-effected sounds.

I was also encouraged by my tutor to simulate flight. After a lot of thought on different ways to do that I think the combination of the tremolo effect with panning and volume automation gave me the sound that I had in mind.

In contrast to Composition 1 I feel pleased with the way I treated the sounds (giving each region an individual voice) and the way the piece is developed. I was feeling more confident using Logic this time around and I think that it shows in the results.

On Sunday, the 9th of May, I was able to attend a concert at Cambridge art gallery “Kettle’s Yard”. Inside the gallery amongst paintings and sculptures made by other contemporary artists, that set the atmosphere for “Frame-Breaking”, I had the privilege to witness the first performances by Richard Hoadley and Tom Hall, who are both lecturers in my university, Sam Hayden, Katy Price and Katharine Norman.The performance was also diffused in a surround speaker system which made the experience even richer.

The programme opened with Katharine Norman’s You Need a Cab? (2000)  and Anything From The Minibar? . Both pieces lasted for about 5 minutes each. The first one took us for a “sonic” ride in a taxi simulating every sound that you could encounter in such a trip and more. The second one followed the conversations that took place in a hotel reception.

The next piece was Richard Hoadley’s One Hundred and Twenty-Eight Haiku.  The sounds of this piece where generated on the spot by the composer himself with the use of DIY hardware instruments. The outcome was a very interesting approach to combining composition with improvisation.

The Tom Hall and Sam Hayden piece Frame-Breaking combined textures of two electric guitars (placed in opposite sides of the room) Computer generated sounds and narration. Being a guitarist my self I found the textures very interesting and especially the way the guitars where calling and responding to each other.

The programme ended with Katy Price’s Bookmachine. The piece had a computer generated narrator which was accompanied by sound made with the use of books. A lot of taping, scratching and ripping was involved and the occasional comic approach that made the audience laugh.

For this composition I am thinking about transformation of sound. I am going to use the string-scrape sound and the voice. I want to try and match the timbres and transform one to the other and in this way create sound illusions and play with the listener’s expectation. I also want to use silence to frame the sounds but also use a drone or a slow low frequency sound at some point to create contrast in the piece.

For this piece, as I feared, I ended up using too many ideas and leaving them undeveloped. Maybe my poor knowledge of using Logic as a composition tool had a bit to do with it but then again I shouldn’t use it as an excuse.

I started by chopping up the scraping of the string into minuscule sounds and using them in a really spacious way to start and finish the piece. To contrast these tiny gestures I recorded a double bass plucking two notes (perfect 5th) a sound that had a strong attack and went on until the strings stopped vibrating. I used these two sounds as a question and answer to start the piece and to end it but did not use it as clearly in the middle of the piece. Instead what resulted was a soundscape effect that was not as effective mostly because it was quite static and monotonous.

In contrast I think that I did a decent job diffusing the piece while presenting it into the four speakers. In the beginning of the piece  the silence that framed each group of short sounds really served me well as it gave me plenty of time to adjust the faders to achieve an effective spreading of the gestures in the big recital hall. And then again the long drone-like double bass sound gave me freedom to move it slowly across the room (mostly in a circular motion) to achieve  one more contrast with the short sounds that jumped out from adjacent  speakers in the room.

Things get more serious now. More time can mean more freedom to develop ideas but could prove to be a trap if, while trying to expand the piece, too many different ideas are used.

In this piece I am going to stick with the string scrape sound that I used in my one minute piece and explore different ways of developing and manipulating it into different shapes. I was also thinking about adding another sound that will act as an answer to the scrape. After listening to Julio D’Escrivan’s piece ‘Salto Mortal’ which is a clean showcase of call and response, I am very interested in exploring the effect. Having more time, I also would like to make good use of silence. The use of silence between sound gestures can be as effective as a sound, if not even more.

As a project for my Acousmatic Composition class I needed to compose a one minute piece using a single sound. I decided to use a sound I had already recorded in the beginning of the semester, which was a scrape across my guitar’s string.

In the composition I had to explore different ways of altering the sound. One technique was to play around with the length, either making it shorter and faster or shorter and slower. I found it very useful for example to stretch the sound and use it to create a nice soundscape that would fill the silence between the faster moving gestures in the piece. Another technique was that of retrograding the sound which changes it to something that sounds like it is out of this world.

This project seemed an easy task in the beginning since it had to be only a minute long. By the time it was finished I realised that the short time I had meant I had to be  very exact with the material I was using. More time might seem hard to fill but  one simple idea is easily expanded without much difficulty. It was in that way very exact and awarding. Maybe a piece of music that is short but to the point could be more effective that a long one.

We chose this piece with two fellow students to present and diffuse in class for  ”Acousmatic Composition”. As the name states this is a piece written for piano fused with  electronic sounds, and may I say, very effectively.  The piece is divided in three movements. Each movement is subtly different but all three share the piano and electronic sounds.

Reading the album sleeve notes by the composer but also listening carefully I understood  the meaning of the title ‘Piano Nets’- nets being the ‘networks’ of notes or more simply put, the chords. The piano part is mostly confined in chordal playing with some occasional single note lines, but besides conventional playing there are sounds of plucked strings and percussive sounds that mix with electroacoustic sounds. You could say that there is a kind of call and response going on between the different sounds. It is a very interesting piece of music. I personally find pieces like that, that combine acoustic, and more conventional musical gestures (piano playing chords) with electronic sounds and is something that I would like to incorporate in my own music.

Diffusing the piece was also very interesting because after we finished we had some comments from students about some mistakes we might have done or helpful suggestions. For example while I was diffusing the third movement I forgot about a very loud moment coming after a long silence so I ended up scaring everyone in the hall (including my self). I will keep listening to Dennis Smalley’s pieces, especially the ones that use instruments with the world of the electronic sounds.

Studying and getting into electronic and acousmatic music opened up a world of possibilities in front of me. One of the aspects of this kind of music ,that is very interesting, has a lot to do with the diffusion of sounds, creating the illusion of movement. This is achieved by changing the source of the sound by controlling the output of each speaker that you are using . What we have done in my acousmatic composition class so far was to use four speakers that are placed in each corner of a recital hall.

So we have one speaker in front and left (1), one in front and right (2), one behind and left (4) and one behind and right (3) which we control from a main console. One of the basic techniques is to use a pair of adjacent speakers and move the sound to the opposite one e.g. from  1 and 2 to 3 and 4, achieving front to back motion  or from 1 and 4 to 2 and 3 achieving left to right motion. Another technique is called circular motion and it creates the illusion that the sound is moving around the listener. To achieve this effect you just move the sound from one speaker to the next. For example From 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 and so forth. Another option is to send the sound in one of the speakers and then gradually increase the output of the remaining ones to fill the room.

These effects can be of course automated before hand but I find that diffusing a piece of music in real time makes the performance more exciting.

In one of my classes called ‘Acousmatic Composition’ we recently discussed what is the meaning of sounds. Sounds, that are everywhere around us, have always been associated with an object. If we hear barking outside our window we expect to see a dog. If we are crossing the street and hear an engine sound approaching we know that it is a vehicle. But what happens when the image is taken away from the sound? It is surely an extraordinary feeling when it really happens.

As a child I remember a few instances where a word would loose meaning after I had repeated it persistently for a few minutes. I had to pause and think about it for a while before the meaning came back to me and all was normal once again. And repetition is only one of numerous techniques that we could use to achieve this abnormal effect. In acousmatic  composition sounds are used derived of their optical equivalent. Hence the term ‘cinema for the ears’. Our ears then become the only guides to a new sonar world.

When I first encountered this music and the ways it is applied it felt uncomfortable and strange. But as I keep listening and experiencing it, it starts to make sense. I found great interest in mixing recorded and manipulated sounds with instruments playing in real time.