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
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
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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