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