Category Archives: 2007

Music composed in 2007

Shorts: #19 Spin cycles

[play]Shorts: #19 Spin cycles (2007)

Commissioned and titled by Nick Fox-Gieg.

I made this piece with idea of making it ballet-like, but it ended up a different kind of dance-y. I controlled the rhythm with an LFO pulse wave, controlled by another LFO pulse wave. In the last section, there is also an envelope on the filter, which becomes more important than the envelope on the amplitude. This piece reminded me of playing bass guitar. Also, it was fun sliding the tracks around to get the beats to match up. The MOTM has very, very stable oscillators, which kept the beats in synch across over an hour, while I fiddled with other knobs and recorded tracks.

Nick is constantly amazed that the kids today listen to music via their cellphones – not with the headphones, but with the internal speaker, so this piece has low frequencies which distort on tiny speakers.

Nick is working on a film to go with this music. It will be posted to his video cast, which is at http://www.fox-gieg.com/spiders/.

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Shorts: #17 linea punteggiata

[play]Shorts: #17 linea punteggiata (2007)

Commissioned and titled by Alan Anzalone.

This piece was made using a morse code translator from the internet. Some of the sounds come from a file format conversion that failed to work correctly. The rest are from my MOTM analog synthesizer.

I was inspired to make a piece using morse code from the loss of my previous cell phone. When I received an SMS on it, it would spell out SMS in Morse code. I thought it would be nice if it could also spell out the name of the message sender or even the message. However, the phone went much, much slower than standard morse goes. I still think this is a good idea, though, at least for names.

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Shorts: #16 Delaware Covered in Red Velvet

[play] Shorts: #16 Delaware Covered in Red Velvet (2007)

Commissioned and titled by Matt Davignon.

This piece was created with my MOTM synthesizer. I took a couple of the oscillators and ring modulated them and AM modulated them. I sent the ring modulation to a high pass filter, the AM to a low pass filter and mixed them together with a notch filter. This has a very analog synthesizer sound, also the brittleness (for lack of better terminology) is a characteristic sound of the MOTM 420 filter, which I used for the high pass and for notch.

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Shorts: #15 Space Corridor

[play] Shorts: #15 Space Corridor (2007)

Commissioned and titled by Graham Coleman.

I made this pieace in the BEA 5 lab at Sonology at the Royal Conservaory in The Hague, Netherlands. This uses MIDI-controlled analog oscillators and the primary sound source. My friend Nick Fox-Gieg set up the MIDI control from his laptop and helped me with a MAX patch. The oscillators went out to the plate reverb – which is an actual 200 kilo plate hanging in the attic someplace. The output of that was ring modulated and sent back to the plate. A lot of the signal also went through the lovely third octave filter in the lab.

The one drawback of the plate is that there’s a lot of hiss in the connection to it. I used the TAP de-Esser and some EQ to lessen the hiss. It also took some of the ‘pop’ out of some of the notes, which makes the whole piece smoother.

Graham is planning on remixing this piece.

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Shorts: #14 Exodus

[play] Shorts: #14 Exodus (2007)

Commissioned and titled by Sean Johnson.

This was created with a MOTM modular synthesizer. The tones were created with three pulse wave oscillators, all of which were pulse wave modulating each other. Their output was fed through a low pass filter and bandpass filter. the output of those filters plus the unfiltered pulse waves were send through a notch filter. My short pieces tend to not have gaps in them nor much dynamic range, so I tried to put both those things into the final mix.

This piece was commissioned via eBay.

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Shorts: #13 Contact

[play] Shorts: #13 Contact (2007)

Commissioned and titled by Sean Johnson.

It was created in the BEA 5 lab in Sonology at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. That lab is a room full of a giant voltage controlled synthesizer. The basis for all the sounds in this piece came from a comparitor. Two triangle waves, one frequency modulated, were fed into a comparitor. This comparitor generated a pulse whenever the traingle waves crossed each other. These pulses form part of the piece, as does some clicking generated by a VOSIM module which was controlled also by the comparitor and the triangle waves themselves. I also mixed in a bit of mixer-generated noise.

This piece was commissioned via eBay.

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Columbo

[play] Shorts: #12 Columbo (2007)

Titled and commissioned by Jascha Narveson.

I did this with my synthesizer, running pulsewaves through a logic gate and then through a low pass filter. I’ve only really used the logic gate in a piece once before, since I’m not quite sure what it’s useful for, but it does make very square attacks, which can be interesting.

This piece has just one more question, it almost forgot . . .

Jascha notes:

If the piece has any more questions for me, i’ll have to insist on a warrant – i’m a very busy man and my wife and i are *very* distraught over the sudden and inexplicable death of her overbearing, tyrannical, but extremely wealthy father…

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I Agree With T

[play] Shorts: #11 I Agree With T (2007)

Titled and commissioned by Timanna Bennett.

The sounds here were made on my synthesizer. I used a bunch of square waves which have pulse width modulation. This can give a voice-like timbre sometimes. I pass these throught a low pass filter and then a high pass filter, which can theoretically increase the vocal-likeness of the sounds. They didn’t come out very vocal-like, but I think they’re still interesting.

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Shorts #10 Meditation Bustle

[play] Shorts #10 Meditation Bustle (2007)

Titled and commissioned by Jen Savage.

As I was making this, I recalled that I had a file on my computer which was Jen Savage talking. I’d asked years ago if I could make it into a piece, but hadn’t had a clear idea of what to do with it. Then I read something about subliminal messages, which inspired me to experiment with convolution. I convolved Jen’s voice with intermittent pulses and used the resulting timbre at the beginning and the end of the piece.

The other sounds come from my synthesizer. I made high pitch ticks by taking a couple really slow modulated pulsewaves and ran them through a high pass filter. The more ringing sounds have the same process again, but this time going through a low pass filter after the high pass, with the frequencies of both tuned very near to each other and the Q turned up so high it’s on the verge of a terrible high whine.

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