WAAPA Music : Composition : WAAPA Musicians Blog

In composing my piece of Musique Concrete I wanted to create something that although employed the acousmatic concepts of the ’sonorous object’ and hopefully will create a ‘pure listening’ experience for the listener, also utilized some of the more traditional compositional methods in its contruction. To this end, I wanted my piece to actually have a discernable metre which a great deal of this style of music does not contain. This was not done in anyway as an attempt to undermine Schaeffer’s compositonal method but rather to perhaps interpret his ideas under a different light. And it is my hope that this will be apparant to the listener.

For this field report, I simply recorded sounds from the cafe over a couple of minutes and cut out samples from the recording that i liked. I cut out a sample of one guy saying ’scared’ and put that on a seperate track and manipulated it by slowing it down, and adding delay and reverb. I also took a sample of one of the cafe workers dropping something in the kitchen and slowed that right down so that the sample repeated twice covers the length of the whole composition. I also mucked around with the base recording which lies under all the manipulations; I’ve put some of it backwards, some of it with reverb, and some has a wah-wah effect on it.   Acousmatically I didn’t want people to listen to it thinking that this is a recording of people in a cafe with some samples over it, I wanted it to be listened to as a single entity, and with all the tracks moulded together as one big soundscape. That’s why I put a dark, low sought of drone under the talking so that you don’t lose that sense of linkage between the original sounds, and the manipulated ones. Cafe Field Report Mix

Okay so for my final project I have done an acousmatically minded remix of Chior Practice.

I approached this composition as something enjoyable to listen to, rather than a direct experiment in the application of accousmatic concepts (although I guess it was partially that too, but I guess all my music is partially that anyway… I just didn’t know it before).

 As a result of this method of compostion, the original sounds are often not left in the mix… and you hear is the changed versions, because of this it is probably worth explaining what some of these sounds origianally were, so you grasp the acousmatic qualities of the song. For example there is a chime-like sound that comes in at 00:48 and then again at 4:11, I can’t remember how I got it to sound like chimes but it was originally the sound of capsicums roasting in my oven. The airy, distorted sound that is present right from the beggining was originally one of Anthony Maydwells chords on the piano, infact I think it is the chord he plays at 1:13. The somewhat metalic noises that come in at 3:18 were originally me hitting pots and glasses with knives in my kitchen, and the ‘noise’ that comes in at the same time was the sound of the cooling fan on my video projecter.

I feel that this piece works acousmatically, I doubt many people would have guessed the original source of many of these sounds (especially the capsicums). I also find it enjoyable to listen to and particularly it’s loose yet present sence of form. I feel another aspect of the piece that works strongly acousmatically are the parts where Maydwell and the chior are interacting, and usually I have manipulated one of the two. I feel that this momentarilly breaks the listeners connecting with a visual representation of what they are hearing, as they know these sounds are impossible to have come from humans.

Please enjoy.

Malcolms Exercise no.1