by Chris Bragg
This semester in Music 320 I completed a piece which I have titled A View into the Possible Formation of a Tornado. Although this could be considered an edited version of my piece from last semester, I like to think of it as a new piece that uses the last piece I wrote as source material.
The intent of this piece was to show how separate/opposite things, in this piece represented by the region of frequency of the material, can exist and interact. After working on this for a while, I began to think of these areas as being similar to fronts in weather. And so came my idea to use the piece as a formation of another entity as the "high" and "low" frequency regions (fronts) combined and crossed to create a resulting region where they both exist, as well as "medium" frequencies (tornado).
The structure of this piece in it's final form is A-B-A'-B'-A"-B"-A"'-B"'-C. The A sections have the "low" frequency motives, the first of which being ~30 sec., with the other three reducing in amount of time with each repetition. The B sections are the same, but for "high" frequency material. The C section has High-low-medium frequencies and motives and is about 30 seconds.
I used many different synthesis and processing approaches in this piece. It was my intent to concentrate more on learning how to properly use as much of the equipment as possible this semester, rather than to become overly focused on the piece I was working on. Therefore, I used many different ways to process my sounds.
One of the more typical techniques I used in this piece was to take a section from last semester's completed piece, and route it through the bridge, to give me 3 different right/left couplings of it on the mixer. One I would use as a clean version, the other two I would process in some way, usually using both of the digital processors at the same time. Typically these processes would serve the purpose to make my rhythms have more character and to either speed up or to change in some way. I would lay this result on 2 of 4 tracks, then repeat it, only using mono this time and using a different section of the section. The result was to have a track completely different for the original in that some things that stuck out in the original were hidden, some motives were heard more often, and the rhythms had more variety.
Many of the problems I encountered, and a place where I spent a great deal of my time on, were simply dynamic problems attempting to keep my material as contrasting, yet as loud as possible (I thought that some of the higher pitched motives should be as engaging as possible dynamically to try to match the idea of the pressure). I had a lot of success in the end solving these difficulties, though, and I think the result is an involving piece with very good pacing...