This one's not much...

but I just want to say that making things work here is a pain.

Not tech problems, but making ideas come to life the way they should, and making sounds come together the way you imagine it, and making concepts become music, ALL of it is excruciatingly monotonous and frustrating.

But it's kinda cool when it actually starts to look like something....

Some of those musings I promised.

I've been reading my classmates' blogs, and I've discovered that I'm not the only one who was surprised at how well received their piece was. That was interesting, to me. It seems that every one else should have known that their piece was good. I suppose it's true when they say "you are your harshest critic.

What's next for me? I'm working on our next project, and I'm feeling a bit behind. We have to present two pieces, 2-5 min. long, and use a minimum number of tracks that are purely MIDI. And they have to be pretty much concert quality. And they're due in a week or two.

I have one awesome concept, and one not so good one. But, they're two concepts. I am really just sketching out some things trying to make this awesome one work, but it ain't easy. Mostly because I'm inexperienced in music technology. It doesn't feel like trying to force a square peg into a round hole, so much as it feels like trying to figure out what shape the peg is and finding where the hole is to begin with.

It's fun, though. Seriously, I'm not, like, discouraged. It's just hard. I figured it would be, but I'm still enjoying this a bit.

No, I won't tell you what my concept is. You'll just have to wait and see. ;)

My first piece

In our class today, we listened to every one's first homework assignment; take 30 seconds of appropriated sound clips and make them into a one minute piece.

I cut about thirty seconds of a man reading from the first chapter of Genesis. At first, I was making it into a really bad techno-ish type of thing, but I met with the professor of our class who said "Ya know, you don't even really need a peat here. You could just do stuff with the sound clip." So, I scrapped everything, and re-did it all.

It was more a lesson about using the computer and technology as an instrument, rather than making the technology imitate instruments. I didn't use any MIDI, or any loops or beats. I set a tempo, cut up and copied and re attached parts of the speaker, and used that to create my "percussion," and my "melody and counter melodies."

I had to make use of a lot of distortion. I wanted it to sort of be a text painting; "the world was void and without form" was made increasingly muddy, and hard to understand, and "and darkness was on the face of the deep" was brought way down in pitch.

It was WAY different than the music I tend to make. It was very creepy sounding. There wasn't any "tonality" as most people imagine it, because there wasn't any "pitch" as most people imagine it. All of the "melody" had pitch the same way a snare drum has pitch. This is way out of the norm for me.

I was very surprised, then, when my classmates all basically loved it! There was only one student who had one minor issue with me distorting the voices so much, because he couldn't understand the text at all, but he admitted that he understood that it was supposed to be that way and we all here in the buckle of the Bible Belt know what it says any way. Every one caught on to the text painting, and thought it was great. My professor said that the concept would even make a pretty awesome concert piece.

I want to do that. I want to take the concept, re-work it a bit, and make it worthy of a concert. This is my very first piece of technological music. That would be a ridiculously awesome accomplishment if the finished product was concert worthy.

Some changes I would make, though... I want to try and find a way to make the text a bit easier to understand. It's a cool sound, but the text is all important for a text painting. Otherwise, it's just a painting. I also feel like it's a bit... hollow... I don't know how else to describe it. There's a lot of dead space. I want to take a concept I had and move it one step further; the text was given a chorus effect to make it sound like multiple voices were speaking at once. I did this because that was to symbolize the Trinity. Three personalities in one God. I want to take that one step further by removing the reader I found on the internet in an open source archive, and replace it with three recordings. One person would be recorded reading the section of the text three times, each in a different translation. I would use effects on it to kind of symbolize Father, Son, and Spirit, maybe record the "Spirit track" being whispered and turn up the amplitude a bit. But all three would play at the same time, and I would make one voice louder and more audible than the other two when appropriate, such as the spirit hovering over the waters, and they would fade in and out like that. That may help with the hollowness a bit, also, just by giving me more material to play around with.

I need to learn a bit more about Compressing. I couldn't figure that out. I also need some tips about recording. That will be important to the development of this piece.

I also need some writing tips. This was supposed to be a short blog entry. Oops.

An Explanation

I suppose, since I didn't get to in class, that I should explain my video selection.

We were told to find videos that use electronic music, and also some how fits into our major. Since my major is psychology, that ain't easy.

With the MIDI animation videos, it's easy to see what the basic idea is. Different color dots coordinate with different MIDI voices, and the pitch of those voices is higher or lower as the dot is higher or lower on the animation plane. These dots are often times used to make little pictures. And, by some miracle, these pictures seem to make music that fits in with the rest of the song on first hearing.

This is where the psychology kicks in. Especially in the fourth one on the bar, the pictures are quite ornate and it seems that it's impossible that the notes that coordinate with each dot could be part of the song. That's because it is impossible. Especially the picture of the Choccobo (wierd bird looking thing.)

The pictures are made, most likely, without regard to the pitches that they will be creating. There are some exceptions, such as the line in the side of a campitalized "F". Those can easily be made into chords. But, the more complex pictures can't have any place in the music. It is made to sound as if they do by reducing the durration of the pitches. The notes in the pictures go by so fast that it's hard to keep track of them. Underneath the picture, or above it (or both) is the actual peice. By keeping the actual peice going, the mind focuses more on it's pitches and more on the pictures rather than on the sounds that the picture makes. The pictures are associated with the video game, and that games music is surrounding it, so the mind doesn't pay much attention to the picture's pitches and fills in the rest of the song so that it's hard to tell that something's missing.

This plays on a person's attention, and plays on the mind's automatic desire to fill in the gaps.

First Post

This is supposed to be a short Paragraph about "What music technology means to me today." Generally, I don't like these sort of prefabricated thoughts that are given to me to write about, but since this is for a grade I suppose I'll make an exception.

Music technology, to me, is simply another outlet for artistic expression. Duh. The thing is, it's new to me. It's new to everyone, relatively speaking, but I've not had a lot of personal experience with music technology. The closest I've come to it is watching some one else take recordings of some cheesy stuff I've written, record and mix it, and then set it to a movie that we made. That movie, btw, is Once Upon a Time in Japan Two, Son of Once Upon a Time in Japan: The Musical. It won "Best Musical" at the film festival that we submitted it to. It's got a very small, but very dedicated cult following. It's a sort of jacked up comedy version of "The Prodigal Son," which as most people in the Bible Belt know, is one of those stories that Jesus told people. Music has always had two faces in my life; that for pure enjoyment and that for worship, and in a weird way, that movie is a form of worship. I follow Christ, and so I dedicate some of my music to him. I'm sort of interested to see how that will play out with sound synthesis and music technology. So Music Technology is just a new way for me to enjoy life and worship.