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.

There were no stylistic restrictions on the piece I was assigned to create, so it was as if I had a blank canvas with limited paints.  (But due to the "vast creative space" that is MetaSynth, the possibilities are never really that limited.)

Below are my program notes to the piece, which will serve as a good starting point for going into greater detail about how I put the music together:

In composing “Invitation to Groove,” I sought to compose a driven, upbeat piece with a distinct character.  The challenge to achieving this goal was that many of the sounds in the required database are either based off a pre-existing piece or decidedly atmospheric – longer, fluid sounds capturing a particular scene.  To make these sounds my own (or perhaps more accurately, to transform these sounds to fit my work), I made frequent use of the Shuffler to create definite rhythm and energy.  With the “green onion” technique in mind, the sounds I used from the database were often altered with other effects before being “submitted” to the Shuffler. 

There is no narrative behind “Invitation to Groove”; I chose ‘invitation’ because of the old telephone ring used near the beginning of the piece (and at the end, in reverse).  It’s a little more informal and slightly less cheesy than “Call to Action” or something along that line of thought. 

Speaking of cheesy, with respect to the “Invitation to Groove,” no RSVP is required.  The invitation is always open, and feel free to pass it along to your friends.

 As the program notes indicate, the bulk of the work I did for this piece was in MetaSynth's "Shuffler Room" (henceforth referred to simply as the "Shuffler").  The Shuffler takes any audio file and cuts it up into several small segments.  The user then dictates which segments are to be played when using a custom-made graph.  An example is shown below:

Part of an example graph ("envelope" in MetaSynth-speak) in the Shuffler

The x-axis (only part of which is shown in the example above) represents time; the left being the beginning of the new sound file and the right being the end.  The y-axis scales the length of the original sound file — "0 t" (at the bottom) represents the first segment of the original sound file and "100 t" (not labeled, but it would be at the top) would be the last segment.  So in the graph (or "envelope" as MetaSynth would call it) above, the new modified sound file would start with a short segment from three quarters of the way through the original sound file, followed by another short segment from about 40 percent of the way through the original sound file.

If all that is somewhat confusing (or even if it's not), consider the following visual analogy:

The other controls in the Shuffler allow the user to dictate the speed at which samples are taken (among other things like attack and release time).  It is subsequently possible to create a sound file with a definite, constant beat.  With my most sincere apologies to John Williams, as an example of a shuffled sound file I offer you the Imperial March after it has been through the Shuffler.  Particularly if you are familiar with the piece, it is possible to hear how the original has been, well, shuffled.

As I was working on "Invitation to Groove," I used the Shuffler for another purpose as well: creating random, spontaneous melodies.  To achieve this, I took a sound from the database and isolated a single pitch.  Using another effect in MetaSynth (aptly called "Pitch & Time"), I created a new, single sound file with the original pitch and several transpositions — in other words, a scale.  Plugging this scale into the Shuffler yielded several random notes, but all within the scale I had designed and subsequently "passable" as a melody.  Most of the tunes in "Invitation to Groove" were created in this manner.

The other "groove-y" sounds in the piece, like the one that is first heard, were also created using the Shuffler.  Because the originals from which these new sounds were created were of indefinite pitch (think tapping your favorite tune on a table versus humming it), the new sounds were more percussive in nature.

Putting it all together, the finished product is quite enjoyable, if I do blog so myself.  You can listen to "Invitation to Groove" below:

Enjoy!