I've been pretty busy the last week or so and haven't had time to post anything new. Let's see... I'll have another performance of for technician and audio on the 21st. This time with actual audio. It'll be a longer program with more pieces than last time so I'm hoping that will mean more people in the audience. I was hoping to get onto the program for next week's Sounding Out concert, but I'm not an MFA so they couldn't fit me in. Eh. I was going to present a new piece I'm developing called n equals. Technically, the version I would have presented would be called n = 5; 34.3927, -118.5674. Not really as mathematical as it looks, although I personally really enjoy that aspect. I pick a central location (ROD Music Hall @ CalArts) and an integer (5, because ROD has a 5.1 sound system). Then, in the directions from which each of the speakers face, I travel 5 km and make a field recording wherever I end up which lasts 5 minutes. Then I bring those recording back to the central location, and play them all simultaneously from the direction they originated. I kind of want to talk about what this means to me, but I wouldn't feel comfortable at this point putting something like that into writing, even if it is entirely editable. Of course I found out I wouldn't be able to present the piece AFTER I made the recordings. These 5 locations I ended up with looked pretty cool. Several of them I would have to hike to, which I'm more than fine with. One was in the middle of a suburban neighborhood, another was in some kind of industrial park. With my good friend Houston, I set out to make these recordings. We were heading to the first location, which was way far east on Pico Canyon Road, when we reached a gate and a dude who was supposed to be security.
guy: Who are you guys with?
me: No one, we just wanted to check out what's over here.
guy: Can't let you in.
me: Why? Is it private property?
guy: I just can't. How are you gonna get in? There's a gate right there.
me: Well then what IS over there?
guy: Can't tell you.
me: ... Okay... Thanks...
So that was a big, sketchy let down. I anyone reading this knows what's at the end of Pico Cyn, I would very much like to know. Also maybe how to get in... So we had to go back to town, and redo the directions. I ended up changing it n to 3, maintaining the hard left and right directionality, but combining the rear left and right into a back center. This made things much more manageable. The three new locations were a high school, another suburban neighborhood, and somewhere in the middle of Railroad in Newhall. These recordings turned out very well. And Houston got some beautiful pictures of the process. Here's a stereo mix of the result:
http://www.mediafire.com/?gj05jsa4ct781
The best news of all is that I've sent an email to an artist called Naut Humon who curates a space with 10.2 surround sound and 360ยบ, 10 channel video projection. He calls it the RML. I've asked him to help me do a realization of n = 10. That would just be incredible. I would die. Here's his website. The thing looks pretty sick to say the least.
I'll be better about posting in the future.
Lates.
-- Aidan
Friday, November 4, 2011
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Concert last night
I premiered for technician and audio last night and it couldn't have gone better. I walked on-stage, set a music stand in front of the audience, and put my recording device on it. I broke with my score a bit to use my headphones in order to get good levels, but that's negligible to me. I set my headphones down on the music stand and sat down on a piano bench on the side of the stage. It was beautiful! Five minutes of glorious (near) silence! The music stand was just on the edge of a spotlight. Most people stayed pretty quiet, but there were others who were definitely made uncomfortable by the silence and would move in their seats every few seconds. You could hear clearly some hiss from the stereo system, which I'm surprised by! I thought our system was a little better than that... Very faintly, you could hear someone practicing the piano somewhere outside the hall. At five minutes I got up, stopped the the recording, and thanked the audience. VERY FUN. It was even better that that was how the show ended.
I must leave to work on a short trumpet and trombone duet for writing for brass. I'm employing a similar system that I used for the percussion piece, but it's become a bit more involved. I created a Max patch that will give me a series of sounding events. These again are made up of one part sound, one part silence, this time in proportion according to the golden ratio. The patch determined which part comes first, whether the sound is pitched or non-pitched, whether that sound is percussive (and if it is, whether it is repeating or non-repeating), what kind of pitch and/or amplitude envelope the sound has, and what starting or general dynamic level it has. For this piece, I took 3 groups of 5 consecutive sounding events and layered them on top of one another. Similar to the percussion piece, the only pitch material I'm dealing with is the first 16 partials of an overtone series stemming from Bb (again, approximated). I'll post the recording, and perhaps the score when they're both finished.
I'll leave you with a wonderful field recording I made with my cell phone of all devices. It was made at the Cleveland High School pool while I was waiting to take a Water Safety Instructor class. There was this guy waiting for his kid to get out of a swim lesson, I guess, and he was playing this beautiful melody on a flute which, I learned after asking him, was Egyptian in origin. I filtered out some of the noise using SPEAR and it also sounds pretty damn cool. Here's both versions:
raw: http://www.mediafire.com/?8r2pckaf4jslzaf
filtered: http://www.mediafire.com/?4b74hnpsj45lzya
Enjoy!
-- Aidan Reynolds
I must leave to work on a short trumpet and trombone duet for writing for brass. I'm employing a similar system that I used for the percussion piece, but it's become a bit more involved. I created a Max patch that will give me a series of sounding events. These again are made up of one part sound, one part silence, this time in proportion according to the golden ratio. The patch determined which part comes first, whether the sound is pitched or non-pitched, whether that sound is percussive (and if it is, whether it is repeating or non-repeating), what kind of pitch and/or amplitude envelope the sound has, and what starting or general dynamic level it has. For this piece, I took 3 groups of 5 consecutive sounding events and layered them on top of one another. Similar to the percussion piece, the only pitch material I'm dealing with is the first 16 partials of an overtone series stemming from Bb (again, approximated). I'll post the recording, and perhaps the score when they're both finished.
I'll leave you with a wonderful field recording I made with my cell phone of all devices. It was made at the Cleveland High School pool while I was waiting to take a Water Safety Instructor class. There was this guy waiting for his kid to get out of a swim lesson, I guess, and he was playing this beautiful melody on a flute which, I learned after asking him, was Egyptian in origin. I filtered out some of the noise using SPEAR and it also sounds pretty damn cool. Here's both versions:
raw: http://www.mediafire.com/?8r2pckaf4jslzaf
filtered: http://www.mediafire.com/?4b74hnpsj45lzya
Enjoy!
-- Aidan Reynolds
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Concert Monday @ 8
Hello again,
Yesterday in experimental music workshop, we performed realizations of Six for percussion by John Cage. My instruments included a book, a spiral notebook, my keys, a stainless steel bowl, and a guitar case. It's by far one of my favorite classes.
Monday night @ 8 in ROD Music Hall at CalArts is the first of the Undergraduate Composers Concert series. I'll be performing a premier of a recently written piece for technician and audio (0.0; 10/24/11). Take a look at the text score and you will see what I mean by "a" premier. The basic premise of the piece is to make a recording in a location, in this case a performance space, then play it back in another location while making a new recording. I'm extremely interested in this process of creating telescopic sound environments and I don't know of anyone else who is doing this. I'll post the results once I have them!
For now, I'll leave you with another short recording. This was created by recording the car rides from home to CalArts and back (I hung my Zoom from my rear-view mirror), and mixing them together. THEN I chopped the result into 6 equal parts and played them all simultaneously. My very initial idea was to capture the process of the signal of my car radio going from clean near my house, to total static as I approach school; but this was also for a class on electro-acoustic composition and there were time constraints. So it turned into this 3-and-a-half-minute cross-section of a sonic experience lasting something like 45 minutes. I found out later that this is very similar to Weiss/Weisslich 22 by Peter Ablinger which does the same thing with the symphonic works of major classical composers. There are audio examples of this to be found at the link above; they're mind-blowing. No official title for this yet, but let's tentatively call it, in subtle reference to Ablinger's work, home to/from calarts:
http://www.mediafire.com/?xh0oj2jkfu40ul0
-- Aidan Reynolds
Monday night @ 8 in ROD Music Hall at CalArts is the first of the Undergraduate Composers Concert series. I'll be performing a premier of a recently written piece for technician and audio (0.0; 10/24/11). Take a look at the text score and you will see what I mean by "a" premier. The basic premise of the piece is to make a recording in a location, in this case a performance space, then play it back in another location while making a new recording. I'm extremely interested in this process of creating telescopic sound environments and I don't know of anyone else who is doing this. I'll post the results once I have them!
For now, I'll leave you with another short recording. This was created by recording the car rides from home to CalArts and back (I hung my Zoom from my rear-view mirror), and mixing them together. THEN I chopped the result into 6 equal parts and played them all simultaneously. My very initial idea was to capture the process of the signal of my car radio going from clean near my house, to total static as I approach school; but this was also for a class on electro-acoustic composition and there were time constraints. So it turned into this 3-and-a-half-minute cross-section of a sonic experience lasting something like 45 minutes. I found out later that this is very similar to Weiss/Weisslich 22 by Peter Ablinger which does the same thing with the symphonic works of major classical composers. There are audio examples of this to be found at the link above; they're mind-blowing. No official title for this yet, but let's tentatively call it, in subtle reference to Ablinger's work, home to/from calarts:
http://www.mediafire.com/?xh0oj2jkfu40ul0
-- Aidan Reynolds
Friday, October 21, 2011
Introductions are in order. And a recording.
I'm Aidan. I go to the California Institute of the Arts. I study music, or what I like more and more like to call sound art. I make a lot of noise. I make a lot of field recordings. I'm interested in sound environments and how they can be presented, combined, preserved, improved.
I'm going to use this blog to get my art out. Most of the things I'm going to post will be recordings or scores. Of course any links I find fascinating. I'll even do short reviews of albums that come up randomly on my iPod.
As a welcome, here's a download link to a short percussion trio I wrote last semester. I know I said I make "sound art" so I'd appear all intellectual, but that stuff is on its way, I assure you. I just finished a remix of Radiohead's The King of Limbs that will I have yet to upload. So this will give you a sense of my varying interests and concerns. Back to the percussion piece: I wrote this using a random procedure to generate durations of sound events and silences for each part. The only durations I made available were prime numbers in seconds, simply because I'm partial to prime numbers. Each duration has a particular rhythm or rhythmic quality assigned to it. The pitched and unclearly pitched material is is divided into high, medium, and low, chosen randomly per event. Further, I limited pitches to the prime-numbered partials stemming from a low G, approximated of course. Actual pitch contours and dynamics were written without the use of a process. Please enjoy.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ILE5NLWP
-- Aidan Reynolds
I'm going to use this blog to get my art out. Most of the things I'm going to post will be recordings or scores. Of course any links I find fascinating. I'll even do short reviews of albums that come up randomly on my iPod.
As a welcome, here's a download link to a short percussion trio I wrote last semester. I know I said I make "sound art" so I'd appear all intellectual, but that stuff is on its way, I assure you. I just finished a remix of Radiohead's The King of Limbs that will I have yet to upload. So this will give you a sense of my varying interests and concerns. Back to the percussion piece: I wrote this using a random procedure to generate durations of sound events and silences for each part. The only durations I made available were prime numbers in seconds, simply because I'm partial to prime numbers. Each duration has a particular rhythm or rhythmic quality assigned to it. The pitched and unclearly pitched material is is divided into high, medium, and low, chosen randomly per event. Further, I limited pitches to the prime-numbered partials stemming from a low G, approximated of course. Actual pitch contours and dynamics were written without the use of a process. Please enjoy.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ILE5NLWP
-- Aidan Reynolds
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