Acousmatic Composition

This week I got to grips with my second composition. After some playing about with it I settled on creating an ambient piece and I took what I’d done along to tutorials and the feedback was extremely helpful. I made better use of the river/water sounds by doubling them underneath at a lower pitch. I also added a few synth sounds to highlight certain features in the music. I also added a synth sound to lessen the impact of some of the wind noise on a few of the recordings. I found a synth that had an airy/breezy sound and then used this for some time in the composition to give the whole thing a feeling of unity. Unfortunately I didn’t manage to stick to the original plan of using arch form and instead went with making the most of the sounds in a progressive way.
I then went to automate and did encounter a few problems. On some of my tracks I found that there was only a single dot rather than three and on other tracks found that the sound didn’t appear to be moving as much as I would have expected. However, I did the best I could and produced something that I was happy with.
Overall I’ve really enjoyed this module, I’ve learnt so much and though it’s been hard work it’s also been very rewarding.

I played my first composition to a few friends this week and although they enjoyed some noted that something was missing. A couple of days later I was sat in the music department and saw some people playing about with the piano at the end of the hall (the one with no front to it). Some of the different timbres sounded amazing so the next day I arrived at uni particularly early and decided to make a few recordings. My plan was to transform the sounds in accordance to the rest of the composition but when I added the unedited sound I was really pleased with the effect it had against
the flute sounds. I went on to include more piano sounds at the end of the composition, shifting some of the pitches but also leaving some unchanged.
This week 045 was set up with six speakers so we could go in and try out our automation in a 5.1 setup. This was extremely helpful and I got my first composition completed.

So this week I began to actually compose my second composition. After collecting all the sounds and having previously planned out my structure I thought this time round would be a lot simpler than my first composition. I was wrong. The problems I’d had with the amount of wind in my recording soon became clear when I tried playing the sounds back to edit. I had to get rid of a few sounds altogether and the ones that were okay took a lot of editing until I was left with fragments of the sounds that didn’t sound too distorted. Once I was happy with my sounds I then altered them using ixi quarks or sampling them.
Again Heather and I have been doing a lot of setting up of the mixer in 029 so I’ve had the opportunity to listen back to my sounds in the eight speaker set-up and each time I’m still amazed at the difference it makes. I also had a little go at playing around with the automation on my first composition and found it interesting to see the different effects that can be achieved compared to diffusing with the mixer.

Over the Easter holidays I went to collect my sounds. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to go on the walk I’d originally had in mind but at the first sign of sunshine I headed to the heart of Yorkshire and went on a circular walk that would provide similar sound sources to the ones I’d planned for.
I did however encounter quite a few problems when recording the sounds. Mainly this was how much background wind noise was being picked up. However, when I wasn’t at the top of the hill I got some really good recordings of the river and the waterfall. I also discovered a water pump that could produce some interesting colours in my second composition.
In the end I got recordings of the following sounds:

• Footsteps
• Grass
• Gate being opened
• River
• Waterfall
• Water pump
• Birdsong