This semester saw the long-awaited completion of my Doctorate. Portions of the my doctoral composition, OPpenheimERA, were performed by the University of Illinois Chamber Orchestra this fall. While I currently have no plans for the fall, I've been looking for opportunities in many directions.
A compact disc including my composition Implosion for Vibraphone and Two-Channel Tape was recently completed. This recording was performed by Geoffrey Brady, a Madison-area percussionist. Currently, I am working on a composition for Flute and Tape. This piece is being composed with the aid of Common Music and programs of my own design. The sound is being produced by M4C, using class instuments, additive synthesis, and instruments of my own design.
This past year I have been working on a 6-minute 2-channel piece, titled s, by using music concrete techniques in Studio A. After working with voltage-controlled synthesizers for two years, I found myself limited to certain kind of sounds that I am able to create or prefer to create. But I also understand that sometimes working with electronic music is so fantastic because of its unpredictability. There are always so many possibilities waiting for you to find or to explore. After a discussion with Professor Wyatt, he suggested that I go back to the old techniques‹Musique Concrete.
I, first, recorded some sounds of found objects, some sounds from "sound effects" CDs, and some sounds from a CD of sampling instrumental sounds. Then I started doing some digital editing and processing through SoundDesigner II and Hyperprism, and ProTools‹ at a later stage. It took me a long time to come up with the kind of sounds I would like to have in the piece. Finding them resulted primarily from my obstinacy. I have been trying to "create" the sound I desired. To some degree it is good and challenging, but not at all practical, because of the severe demands upon time.
After I ended my "star-catching" dream, I started assembling those sounds together. Compositionally, I would like to produce effects of shift between environment and landscape. I'm not quite sure if I managed to create the kind of effects I planned to have, but, so far, I find the finished part quite acceptable.
This past year I have also been helping in the completion of the new Studio D, the construction of the new Studio X, and the preparation for the new Studio A and B.
This past semester was spent in Studio A, working on two main pieces. The first was a continuation of a project that had been started the previous semester (a reinterpretation of Blondie's One Way or Another). This was recorded first to ADAT, then to DAT. I was moderately pleased with this endeavor, as it reinforced my mixing skills and work with the Buchla synthesizer. Much time was spent working with successfully matching up rhythms (borrowed guitar noises for harmonic content in time with Buchla generated percussive noises in time with vocals). Since nearly all of the sounds in this work were taken from outside sources, I decided to reverse this for the second project. All harmonic content was generated on the Buchla; only a few percussion noises were taken from previously recorded sources. I am very pleased with this work... nine minutes of various interwoven sequences mixed for four channels, with synthetic "Œcello" and "Œfeedback" type sounds above this. random percussive fills add to a sense of jumbled arrhythmia that is further heightened by an original text (composed of one cutup and two original poems spliced together). I feel that this semester was quite the learning experience; at times this resulted in much frustration. Currently, I am hoping to have a demo tape put together by June which I will be shopping to various recording labels (metropolis, nettwerk, relapse, and the like). It will be interesting to see what the next few months will bring.
My first year in Studio A has been very instructive. While getting acquainted with the Studio in the Fall, I finished one work entitled Instigators with sounds created with the Buchla and Roland synthesizers. This semester I finished one short composition and began another focusing my energies on imaging and location. As I will be gone next year, I feel fortu-nate to have had the opportunity to work in a setting with such a variety of equipment and technology. I now look forward to any future opportunity I may have to work in studios elsewhere.
I have nearly completed work on a currently untitled composition in Studio A. The composition uses a large number of sounds created exclusively using the Buchla and Roland modular analog synthesizers (along with some digital processing). Since the Buchla will soon be retired as a result of the Studio A renovation, I am happy to have had a chance to work with it intensively before it is gone.
I began to work in the newly renovated Studio D during the spring semester. I spent much of the time becoming familiar with the new organization and equipment, focusing primarily on the Pro Tools digital audio recording/editing software and the Kyma system. I began to work on a short composition to be submitted for the Frog Peak Collaborations Project. For this project, Frog Peak Music asked composers to create one-minute pieces based upon one sound file that can be down-loaded from the Internet. I hope to finish this piece while the studios are open during the early part of the summer session. I also found the Pro Tools system to be extremely useful in the editing of the Buchla/Roland composition that I began in Studio A.
My stereo tape piece, The Truth of Suffering, which was completed last spring in Studio A, was premiered on November 18 in the Student Works Concert. On November 22 my saxophone and tape piece, Reflections, which was realized in the Music Engineering Technology Studios at Ball State University, was performed by Marty Kalas (alto saxophone) in the From Us For You concert.
As Operations Assistant, I spent much of the fall semester valiantly battling ground loops and cable tangles in Studio D. The Experimental Music Studios team and I were eventually victorious, and Studio D opened for business in the spring. I have found the new studio to be not only aesthetically attractive, but also a very well-designed, comfortable and efficient environment in which to work. We are currently preparing to rebuild Studios A and B. I hope those studios meet with as much success, and that all of the studios continue to be an important part of the creative work of students from both within and outside of the composition department.
M.F.A. candidate, Theatre Dept.
This year was an exploration of sound design and recording engineering for me. Fall term was dedicated to creating a library of sounds using the Buchla synthesizer. By the end of the term, I had created a sketch of a piece using Sound Designer II to arrange my sounds into some working layers. After some helpful advising from Professor Wyatt, spring term was spent editing the layers, and engineering them to place the sounds into soundscape images. I found a great help in the Hyperprism program for placing sounds throughout the stereo field. It was an efficient way for me to get various locations out of the same layer. I also had much better success eliminating excess noise in my mixes, and used equalization on the mixing board to clean and enhance the sounds. I added some text that I had on tape from last year, and used Hyperprism to manipulate segments of Buchla sounds into new sounds. Here at the end of Spring Term, I have finished my composition. This piece marks improvement for me in sound design and engineering skill.
As a graduate student in another department (Theatre), I am grateful for the chance to continue my Electronic Music studies within a limited schedule. I have had greater success this year than I expected.
This year I made great strides forward with my studio technique, and with my philosophy of electronic music.
I have realized that electronic music is not only the serious music idiom of the future, it stands a very good chance of becoming an integral part of the common music of the future, this by virtue of the electronic music studio becoming the instrument of the future.
The Experimental Music Studios are the jewel in the School of Music's crown, and Scott Wyatt is the sparkle in that jewel¹s radiance. The high level of composition graduate students attracted to the University of Illinois is, in part due the types of specialized training they can receive here. The small class sizes are a big plus in the possibilities for creative development.
Andrew Walters has been working in studios A and D as well as the Computer Music Project on several projects, including a one minute piece for the Frog Peak collaboration CD.
I am currently working on a composition which includes real-time modification of sounds made by instruments of the Javanese gamelan. In addition I am interested in modifying sounds on tape in real-time. As a first step in this project I made two recordings in the Spring, 1997 semester in Studio A of the Experimental Music Studios. During the process of making the recordings I investigated various ways of creating sounds from specific instruments, and therefore the recordings document the process of investigation. During each of the two recording sessions I uncovered ways of making sounds which I found to be also interesting apart from this process of investigation.
For the first recording I used a ketuk, a small bronze knobbed gong which normally functions as a simple time-marking structural instrument in the traditional Javanese gamelan ensemble. It is normally struck with a wooden beater whose end has been wrapped in thick string. I wanted to investigate the effects of extreme amplification of soft sounds made using this instrument, and, in addition to using the dynamic microphone in Studio A, I used a Barkus-Berry transducer which responds to sound vibrations picked up through the surface it is attached to rather than to sound vibrations travelling through the air. Of course, attaching this to the gong itself immediately dampened the sound. I had brought a light wooden hammer from the Balinese "gong kebyar" ensemble into the studio with me, and found that if I attached this "contact" microphone to its handle, sound vibrations from the instrument resulted from holding the pointed tip of the hammer lightly against the vibrating gong, and these could be recorded. What I found most interesting was that I could trace the nodal pattern of vibrations on the surface of the gong by gently moving the hammer along the gong¹s surface.
For my second recording I used a Javanese "gender panerus", which is a bronze xylophone normally struck using padded wooden hammers. I had recently observed a vibraphone player creating glissandos by sliding a rubber headed mallet along one key. Inspired by this technique, I found that by again using the Balinese wooden mallet, this time the rounded head, and sliding it along the outer end of a key (normally the keys are struck in their centers), a clear and resonant glissando resulted.
I made multiple recordings of these glissandos using a variety of pitches. This instrument contains pitches of high range, and in fact I had tried out the technique on larger instruments of similar construction, but the effect was not as resonant.
I also spent time in Studio D during the Spring, 1997 semester, working primarily with the Kyma digital signal processing system. This was my first in-depth experience with the workings of DSP, and I learned a great deal about the fundamental principles and the seemingly limitless possibilities of working with sound in this way. The Kyma system is extremely flexible and broad-based, and allows for a large amount of user control over the construction and combination of individual sounds. I am looking forward to working with it further. However, I found that the descriptions and instructions in the tutorial documentation did not always match the reality of the software in the studio, which makes the learning process somewhat confusing.
I concentrated on learning to use the MAX programming language during the Spring, 1997 semester. For this I used the midi workstation in Studio C, as well as the equipment in room 5065 and in CAMIL. My project was a flexible repeating sound envelope whose ranges of pitch and amplitude are variable according to user input from a keyboard. As time goes on, the durations of the envelope¹s interior segments become shorter and shorter, finally ending in a short sound which repeats without alteration. The user may delay this process though input from the keyboard, which extends the durations of these individual interior durations. However, once input stops, the process of shortening the duration of the sound gradually takes over again.
In Studio X, I worked on investigating ways in which I might incorporate the real-time sound-processing capabilities of the SGI computer (also running a version of MAX) into my overall project. I plan to implement my MAX program on this computer, and extend it to allow aspects of the sound itself (amplitude changes, primarily) to provide the ³user input², rather than midi information.
During the summer and fall of 1996 I worked in CMP on a project which resulted in a program which alters the spectrum of a sound analysis file. The analysis file, created by James Beauchamp¹s sndan, is altered by multiplying specific harmonics by specific envelopes, which thereby cause the timbre of the sound to change over time. The envelopes themselves and the specific harmonics of the sound to which they are applied are specified by the user.
This idea of using envelopes as a means of creating and altering sound structures was extended by my work on a computer program for algorithmic composition written in Common Music and Lisp. This program uses a set of rising and falling envelopes (taken from graphic data representing the motion of sonic shock waves which occur in the sun). Specific envelopes were selected through a random process and applied phrase by phrase to amplitude and pitch. The ranges of amplitude and pitch were also chosen using random processes. Throughout these processes my interest was always in maintaining the largest number of possibilities as a source for specific choices. In my composition Helios, for string quartet, a midi file was generated for each phrase, and opened as a Finale notation file. I then transcribed, as accurately as possible, each phrase based on the soundfile itself, referring to the notation file whenever it was useful to do so (since such a large number of notes were generated, the notation file was unreadable in an ordinary sense most of the time). Each of the four string parts was generated independently, using this same procedure. An overall time structure for the composition had been constructed as a first step, which allowed for an increased probability of activity over time. In performance, the four independent parts were played simultaneously as a usual string quartet.
Here is a list of some of the projects/activities that I was involved with during the last nine months: