Electronic Interlude: Part 3 of 3

An image I created using MetaSynth's "Image Synth."  Each pixel represents a note in time.

In this third and final part of "Electronic Interlude," I will share my most recent, completed electronic project, which I have called, "In Hindsight, the Treat Would Have Been Better." As was the case with the piece I shared in part 1 of 3 of this "miniseries," this most recent work fulfilled an assignment, viewable by clicking here.

Like "Invitation to Groove" (discussed in part 1 of 3), "In Hindsight, the Treat Would Have Been Better" was built from a database of collected and modified sounds. But in this case, each sound was generated with a specific tool in MetaSynth – the Image Synth. With the Image Synth, any picture you draw (or import) is translated into a sound file.  The rules are simple, but the possibilities are endless.

Electronic Interlude: Part 2 of 3

Source: The New York Times

Election day has (finally) arrived, and millions of Americans will be going out to vote today; many have already voted as well.  While this is not a political blog, I do want to take this opportunity to share a piece I put together almost exactly a year and a half ago.  Like the piece I shared in my most recent post, this work is electronic.  The title of the piece is "Responsibility," and it was composed as part of a fairly open-ended final project for a class I was taking at the time called "Music Since 1950."  (In other words, the project was not specifically to write an electronic piece; some students in the class simply wrote research papers, etc.)

"Responsibility" is purposefully based off of a piece titled "Come Out," composed by Steve Reich in 1966.  (Interesting factoid: Steve Reich and I have the same birthday.)  "Come Out" was one of the pieces we studied in the class, and I wanted to go through the experience of putting together a similar work.  I detailed both the backstory of "Come Out" and my own process in creating "Responsibility" in an accompanying paper, which you can find here.

For those of you who don't have the time to read through everything, here's a brief rundown:

Electronic Interlude: Part 1 of 3

A screenshot from MetaSynth, an electronic music program I have been using as part of the electronic music class I am taking this semester.  The full-size version of the image above can be found here.

I present to you now the first of hopefully many miniseries on "Park Your Ears."  As I have been doing some extensive electronic music work this semester, I thought it would be appropriate to share some specifics.  This miniseries will be in three parts, and each part will focus on a particular electronic work I have put together.  Two of these works (parts 1 and 3 of the miniseries) will be projects from the past couple weeks, and they will sandwich a special but apt Election Day interlude.

The first piece I would like to share with you is titled "Invitation to Groove."  The assignment, which can be viewed in full here, essentially boils down to the following directive: make a piece using only a specific database as source material.  The database in this case was a collection of roughly 400 sounds that resulted from the previous assignment.  These 400 sounds were created from 16 original sounds; each sound was modified in several different ways.  My own original sounds included a recording I made myself of paper cups falling onto a wooden surface and a pre-recorded sound effect of a man laughing.  Many of the modified versions of each of these hardly resembled the original.