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.