Unsilent Night Edmonton

Photo credit: Caitlin Smith

Greetings readers,

Tonight I had the chance to be a part of an outdoor electroacoustic soundscape event called "Unsilent Night." In 1992, Phil Kline, wanted to create a public work of art in the form of a holiday carolling party so he composed four 45 minute electroacoustic music tracks which, when they are played simultaneously, form the piece "Unsilent Night." The music is carried through the streets creating a traveling Christmas soundscape. It was very cool. Everybody downloaded the music track, brought a boombox or external speakers for their mp3 players, we hit play, then we started on a promenade through the streets of Edmonton. It was the first time Edmonton has hosted this event (thanks Leanne!) and we had a turnout of 20 enthusiastic individuals.

The most interesting part was hearing the different movements of the piece coming from all the individual speakers. While one stereo had a drone portion, another would have a melodic line with twinkling bells and another would have a chant-like choral line. My stereo just so happened to have the choral line. It was neat to see people's reactions as we walked past. There were lots of waves from people sitting inside restaurants and people on the street with quizzical looks as they walked through our group and were enveloped in our sound.

Photo credit: Caitlin Smith

When we finished our walk from the University to the Old Strathcona gazebo, we placed all of our stereos on the ledge facing in and enjoyed the last few minutes of the piece as we stood in the center. It was a fun evening with new and old friends and some fantastic music. I'm looking forward to next year's event already.

Until next time, take care readers!

Photo credit: Caitlin Smith

Photo credit: Caitlin Smith

Here is a video from an "Unsilent Night" event in Oxford last year:

Choral Descent

Hello again!

As you all might know, my final project for my electromusic course integrated something very close to my heart....choral sounds! In an earlier entry I blogged about my project progress and some of my ideas going into it. What I came to realize though is that the story in my mind during the initial stages could potentially box listeners in when they came to hear it.

Thus, when I had to give a small blurb about my piece before I played it, I just described it as a attempt to fuse sacred and secular choral pieces together. Often, you have to choose one or the other in choral music and there are few songs that integrate both. A piece is either sacred or it is secular. However, I wanted to expand how people listen to choral music so I tried not to subscribe to stereotyped perceptions of choir music. As well, I wanted to create a piece a regular choir wouldn't be able to sing unless they were in some kind of strange double choir formation where one half of the choir was singing sacred music and the other half would be singing secular. These different genres require different technique and mentalities so it would be extremely challenging to have a chorister do both at the same time. However, it's not impossible...

Overall, the piece just experiments with how these genres can be incorporated together to make something chorally unique. I think one of the things I like most is the end where there is an ascending vocal track. It is something I could hear an actual choir singing but there is a unique quality to it since it's actually a reversed track of the beginning of a Hungarian song called Magosh a Rutafa. Thus, it sounds melodic and something a choir could sing but a choir would never actually be able to recreate that sound. A little bit of my experimental electromusic nature creeping in there.

The song is entitled "Choral Descent" since choir music, whether it descends from a heavenly angel chorus or from cow callers in the hills, still arrives at the same goal...to share music with others.

Anyway, give it a listen and tell me what you think! The audience members sitting next to during the recital were kind of snickering to themselves (in a good way I think) since I suppose it sounded funny to infuse abstract choral sounds with Ave Maria choruses. Maybe there is some comedic element to my piece that I did not anticipate? In addition, I know a lot of my fellow choir friends will recognize the tracks I used and maybe can even hear their own voices :)

Joyce's Snow

Hello again everybody,

Since last night was the debut of my electromusic pieces, I thought I would post them here for my readers as well.

My recital went well. It was a bit longer than I expected but the whole recital just felt like an evening with friends, sitting in a dark room, and listening to music. It was intimate and enjoyable.

There were some really neat pieces the 500-level electromusic students did. There was a duet between laptops where they controlled their laptops using their cellphones. I'm not sure the programming details behind what they were able to achieve but it was very neat. They also used Photoshop tablets to control the Disklavier. For those of you who don't know what that means, they pretty much had a piano that looked like it was playing itself but they were being controlled by the tablet they were drawing on.

People from my own class did some very neat things as well. Jacek played his music concrete pieces. There is one where he recorded the resonances from saw blades to create a textural fabric and on top of that sound were sharp clips of everyday sound fragments. Catherine scored ominous music for a short film and she also composed a piece using Nintendo sounds from a unit she ordered from Ebay. Very cool! I won't post their pieces on their Internet but if you ever want to hear them, just ask me, and I'll play a c.d. of their songs for you :)

The piece I have posted below is my first project from the class and is entitled Joyce's Snow. You can read about my progress on this piece in an earlier entry. I recruited my friends to help and recorded them saying the IPA sounds, select words from the passage, as well as the entire last passage from Joyce's "The Dead." I tried to create something that reflected the gentle and illuminating nature of the text passage. That's all I will say now since I think it's better to say less rather than more so you can form your own thoughts about the piece. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments section!

Special thanks to the following people who contributed their voices:

Twila B.
Nick T.
Shruchi B.
Matt G.

P.S I will post my other project in a few days

Musical Challenges

I was chatting with my friend, Tendai, the other day and something very interesting came up that I have not thought about for a long time until he mentioned it. I was telling him about my electromusic class and how I was finding it difficult to work through the musical genesis process. He just reminded me that I needed to challenge myself and face my musical fears head-on. I would never get better at the process of composing electromusic if I don't break away from my desire to always have a melodic line. It makes sense but it's so hard to muster the confidence to go outside of my comfort range. It's something important for me to remember. Instead of just avoiding something I am not able to do well...I just need to suck it up and do it since I'm not going to get better without any effort on my part. However, I am not embarking on the world of nodal sound music for my final project but I am trying to push what I can do with the software and the recordings I have extracted. As well, I am convinced there are a few checkpoints with every musical process:

1. You are excited to start working on the project because you have some really cool ideas
2. You start putting pieces together and maybe are surprised and excited by some cool new sounds you were able to create but soon notice it is not as easy as you thought to realize your goal when you see how much work lies ahead
3. You're extremely insecure as you start formulating the piece but you continue anyway because you can't seem to detach yourself from the piece
4. You feel like what you have done up to this point sounds like complete rubbish and it is extremely frustrating and you consider scrapping the project entirely
5. You take a break from the piece
6. Hopefully, after some time, you come back to the piece and it sounds better than you thought it did
7. As much pain you had to go through, there are some truly rewarding moments where things sounds exactly right and it's enough to put you through this whole painful process once again

It's interesting how much time away from a project can influence your feelings towards it. I was tinkering with my piece today and instead of being frustrated at the ghetto Protools program in the studio and everything it can't do...I just left. It was better than doing something I would regret. I'm not sure what that would have been...since Protools is an inanimate entity...but it wouldn't have been good...trust me. Or worse, it would have been my piece that would have suffered. I am hoping after a two day break Protools will be more cooperative with me. I still have a lot of finishing touches and edits that I need to do on my piece but I am also at the point where I just want to get it finished. Thank goodness I have a deadline or else I could spend forever just playing around with it!

I am writing finals for the next week so I won't have a massive amount of updates but I will be competing with Belle Canto at the St. Albert Rotary festival on Friday. I am sure I will have some thoughts about our performance!

Until then, take care everybody!

Final Project Progress

I am currently in the process of trying to piece together something for my final Electromusic project. I felt like I really depleted a lot of my creative resources into my "Joyce's Snow" piece but the pressure is on to present something cool for my final project. Of course, in staying with my musical roots and using something that I know...I am working with choral sounds!

I started by taking all of my favorite choir pieces and manipulating clips from them. But I ran into trouble since when I started to pitch shift the voice quality started to change and that was not my intention at all! I manipulated one recording of Chamber Choir and now they sound like a choir of countertenors....not what I was going for!

Since I had no idea what the piece was going to be like I just started taking random sound fragments and putting them together in Protools. Right now my piece concept is kind of like a Choir Sing-off. There's this nomadic choir out in the countryside calling cows and embracing their folk root origins, meanwhile, in town there is a beautiful sacred church choirs singing texts with "Ave Maria". Then nomadic choristers make their way into town and start singing along with the sacred choir grunting and making other weird noises while the church choirs continue to sing. I initially thought I would have them blast choruses to each other but I had way more fun interweaving sound clips from each group so maybe they're just enjoying a random jam session together. Currently, the piece is pretty rough. I have a rough structure laid out but it will probably change. I am a bit afraid that it looks like I haven't done enough work to it or manipulated the sounds enough but I don't want to lose the quality of the voices. It's a tough balance. I did reverse a few of the sound tracks so that the voices are singing backwards and I have to say...Hungarian sounds pretty cool in reverse.

Anyway, I will keep you all posted on further updates. As well, if you want to attend my Electromusic Recital here are the details:

When: Tuesday, April 21 @ 8pm
Where: FAB Studio 2-7

As well, here is a soft synth I did during a break from my project:

Project Updates

As you currently may know, I have been discovering the wonderful world of Protools...the multi-track music software which loves to randomly quit at least once during a session and which I had no idea how to use...until making numerous mistakes and pouring over the pdf user manual.

I discovered an interesting way to approach my Joyce project (since it's based off of Joyce's "The Dead") and the key is to work on only one thing at a time. Otherwise, the whole project is just too consuming and intimidating. I have listed some events from my project progress below (note: this is over the span of 2.5 weeks):

Day 1-Doing the recordings and gaining inspiration from the material I gathered since amazingly unplanned things can occur during a recording session! My friends really pulled it out of the bag and I had some great raw material to work from. Especially Nick! It felt like I had about 50 voice types to choose from with what he gave me! I felt something similar while working on my music concrete pieces since you have to take what you have and let the form of what you have gathered dictate what it should become. Shruchi and Matt's voice gave nice contrast to my recordings too. As well, Twila, gave such a musically poetic reading of the passage that I knew I would have to save her's for last. Twila and I possess the same Joyce obsession and it is audibly apparent how well she understand the text, Joyce, and Ireland.

Day 2-I worked on a synth keyboard to record sounds which convey the mood given by the text. I tried to find sounds that would parallel falling snow and the icy Irish wind or generally anything I thought I could use. I randomly recorded a bunch of different sounds while listening to sections of the text and I decided I would worry later where to put them. It's easier to have more rather than fewer tracks to work from since I wanted to be efficient in my process. As easy as it is to spend hours on a project...I have 4 other classes I need to worry about!

Day 3-I was in slight panic since I still didn't know how to use the software and I was currently drowning in about 27 tracks without any idea of how to put my tracks together. Attending class slightly decreased my worry but I still felt like I had a huge gap of knowledge and was not using the program to its full potential.

Day 4-Setting aside my panic, opening new tracks, and starting to paste together the structural framework of my piece. It looked fragmented but it was satisfying to see the foundation of my piece laid out. It pretty much followed the template I had in my mind so it was less intimidating to approach my piece. Is it normal for musicians to be afraid of the music they're working on? I'll say yes.

Day 5-After learning about automation in class, and fiddling with the program again for longer than I would like to admit, I finally figured out how to automate volume, reverb, panning and other wonderful things. Ultimately, I was able to add texture to the raw voice recordings I obtained and I began to sculpt together an image by using sound and text.

Day 6-Trying to tidy up my tracks and clean things such as transitions and microphone pops from energetic bilabial plosives. I also cleaned up small 1/2 second sections where I didn't sufficiently edit out Twila cursing from her recording session.

I will be presenting my project tomorrow to my class so I'll see what they have to say and tweak the track before our recital on April 21. Also, for those of you who are free, my class will be joining with the 500-level Electromusic course to showcase our projects from this term. It'll be on Tuesday, April 21, at 8pm (I believe) in Studio 2-7 in FAB. Try to come out if you're not busy! People are working on some pretty amazing things and they deserve to be heard :)

As well, since I enjoy killing time during breaks from my project, I recorded other tracks to play with the melody from my original synth piece I posted. I added some volume automating; thus, the dynamics! It sounded a lot better on the studio speakers than my home laptop (I can barely hear the bass line I put in) but you can give it a listen if you like and hopefully you speakers are better than mine.

Synth Jam

Of course, instead of making immense progress on my assignment for my Electromusic course, I took a break and fiddled with random synth sounds on the keyboard and recorded them. For those of you who might be interested in what I'm doing for my actual project, I am trying to rework the last passage of Joyce's "The Dead" into a soundscape-esque entity using text and electronic sounds. I think my project would be going a lot better if I actually knew what I was doing with the software program. Currently, I'm just drowning in tracks with my multi-track software. However, I did get all my instruments working and recording so that's good! Electrical wiring is not my forte, my Physics partner can probably attest to the fact that I was as helpful as a vestigial appendix while silently watching him reconnect the circuit board for our Electricity lab. Yesterday it took me a while to figure out that I couldn't hear the playback because somebody turned the speakers off....But in my defense, people should not be turning off the speakers! That's why we switch the Mbox to input and we can turn down the volume controls on the mixer if we don't want speaker feedback! I'm just saying...

In addition, I'm not used to the process of composing music. For so long I have just sung what has been given to me and I've never really made anything of my own until this class. It's a strange feeling of exposure and vulnerability when you're presenting an artistic side of yourself for the world to see and hear. It's good for me. I also know enough artistic people to know that we're all immensely insecure about our work so I just feel like I'm joining the club. However, nothing good ever came of keeping things to yourself. How does one expect to get better when they are the only ones listening to it? I uploaded the random synth jam session I had during my 10 minute break today. It's rough at best, but I thought some of you might like a listen :)

Fiddling with an Electronic Synthesizer

CIn addition to my experience with music concrete my Electromusic prof, Garth, (yes, the same one who recorded the Cantilon c.d.'s!) taught us how to use the electronic synthesizer. I must say, it was intimidating looking at all the dials and switches on the synthesizer. I'm always afraid to play with electronic equipment since I never feel like I know what I'm doing and if I break it...it won't be cheap. At any rate, I had a fun time fiddling with all the switches and dials and ended up getting some pretty cool sounds out of the synth. It was a bit hard on my ears to listen to a continuous frequency of electronic sound so I found I couldn't work on the piece too long.

In class, when we presented our pieces, I couldn't help but share my thoughts on how my piece sounded like something from a video game. I couldn't help it! So many Sci-Fi films and gaming programs use electronic music so it was hard to cast that image from my mind. Instead of fighting it...I just went with it. The beginning of the piece is pleasant and cheery as if you can imagine Mario bouncing in his pixelated world and squishing spotted fungus. The second section is when he enters the scary dungeons where he eventually has to face the fire-breathing dragon by jumping on him without getting hit by the dragon's spiky hump. However, our hero emerges victorious and continues on his merry way with a triumphant melody to keep him company as he jumps from cloud to cloud in the sky.

I've posted the audio file of it below for you to have a listen:

A Choristers Attempt at Musique Concrète

I am currently taking an electronic music course (my first composition course ever!) and apart from learning essential skills such as microphone placement and recording procedures we get to use software to create our own electronic music.

I can't quite describe the creative process, since I don't know if I have developed a refined enough strategy to share, but in order to not overwhelm myself, I start by fiddling with the sound program and then if I produce something interesting, I save it. I just go where the music takes me I suppose, as cliche as that sounds.

I remember working on my short musique concrète piece and absolutely despising it after an hour of detailed listening I stopped working on it and promptly forgot about it until the next week. Thus, when I was called upon to present it to my class, I didn't know what to say since I didn't remember what it sounded like. Maybe I was blocking out bad memories? The only word I recalled that was at the back of my mind during my sessions of musical genesis was: resonance. When I heard it played aloud in class, I suddenly remembered what I was trying to do: play with the different resonating sounds produced from a class recording session. The sounds range from a box chime-like instrument, a bowed guitar string, or thunder sounds from a toy. In addition to using the resonating sounds I inserted them into the software program since you can play the sounds within difference spaces. I chose various locations with differing resonant frequencies to further change the sounds. The final effect is fragmented but I hope you will appreciate my attempts to branch out in the world of music.

The definition of music is continuously changing and electronic music is only one of the branches of the dense musical network. I'm thinking of incorporating choir recordings for my final project but nothing has inspired me yet. If you have any ideas post them in the comments!