Casino Electroacoustic

The idea for this piece of music came whilst playing cards. I was flicking the cards in my hands attempting to play a song with them, thus the idea of an electroacoustic piece inspired by casinos and their array of sounds came to me.

 

The sounds I recorded consist of cards flicking, shuffling, weaving cards into my guitar strings and playing it; rolling dice in my hands and shaking them in cups made of different materials. The idea of this piece is not just to capture the sound of a casino but also to make the sounds overwhelming to the listener and for it to be somewhat sinister hinting at the addictive nature of gambling. 

This piece makes a lot of use of the Delays GRM tool; with most of the dice sounds primarily using it. The other recordings use the Delays  tool alongside other GRM tools. Other than Delays I use the following GRM tools in this piece such as Doppler, Shuffling, Reson and Freeze. Another interesting production process I used was reversing audio alongside Doppler which I used to create the sound (Fig 1). I also automated it by creating a bell curve with  the circle frequency parameter. This sound is used to represent spinning and everything from slot machines to roulette wheels. I use the sound of dice being shaken in a glass to portray the sound of a large amount of coins falling out of slot machines. I also simply used the original recordings of the dice and card flicking throughout the piece. As I said earlier I wanted the piece to have a slightly sinister undertone; the way I achieved that was by creating an overwhelming force through massive amounts of layering, either by layering cards, dice or both. The other way I tried to give the piece a sinister undertone is simply by boosting the base of the guitar with cards weaved in its strings alongside using some of the GRM tools I have listed above. Another interesting point, to get the sound of the massive amount of cards flicking that plays from two minutes and twenty four seconds to three minutes, I employed the use of the Freeze tool. Automating the pitch offset, random pitch and random duration slowly increasing each control then slowly decreasing them again.

• Cards Flicking on the table
• Cards Flicking in hands
• Card shuffling on the table
• Card shuffling in hands
• Playing guitar with 1 card weaved into strings
• Playing guitar with 2 card weaved into strings
• Dice in hand
• Dice in metal cup
• Dice in glass cup
• Dice in ceramic mug

Cooking up an electroacoustic feast

This piece of music was mainly inspired by Jonty Harrison’s Klang, a piece of music made with a casserole dish. However I decided to lean more into the idea of the sound of cooking using a variety of cooking utensils and ingredients. Apart from banging an array of pots, pans and cups made from different materials. I used the sounds of a hand held blender, sharpening a knife, shaking couscous, boiling a kettle, shaking a bottle of water and a bottle of oil. The goal of the piece was simply to provide the sounds and feeling of cooking a meal.

 

In regards to what GRM tools I used the following: Doppler, Reason, Combfilter, Delays, Bandpass and Freeze either individually or in combination with each other. Another production technique I employed again was the use of reversing audio which was used for the banging bowl effect and a knife sharpening, both of which sounds that can also be heard throughout the piece. They Both of appear within the first thirty seconds of the piece. Notably the banging bowl effect is created by layering the sounds of banging a metal bow and banging a wok together. The part that sounds like boiling water that first appears at twenty eight seconds was created by using the ideas mentioned above. These include snippets of both the oil and water shaking recordings, applying GRM Bandpass, Reason and Delays in that order isolating the lower frequencies and adding as many delays as possible creating that bubbling or boiling sound. Moving on to how I used the boiling kettle recording. The recording itself was not chopped up massively as I wanted it to be easily recognisable as a kettle. That allowed me to use it as a bed of sound to layer things on top of. The sound itself was created by simply adding a GRM Bandpass and automating both X and Y axis of the tool, slowly increasing and decreasing different axes. The hand held blender first appears at a minute and fifteen seconds and is created by using two separate tracks. The first is through the use of the GRM Freeze tool, automating the number of loops and pitch. The second track simply uses the Delay tool with each delay slowing increasing volume. This piece, similarly to the other one, uses a fair amount of unedited audio, outside of cutting it. The recordings that appear unedited are mainly percussive sounds created by the cups alongside the occasional knife sharpening sound. 

• Banging Different Cups
• Using hand held blender
• Sharpaning knife
• Banging a whisk
• Banging a wok
• Banging metal bowl
• Banging glass Bowl
• Banging casserole dish
• Banging pan
• Banging glass serving dish
• Shaking couscous
• Shaking bottle of water
• Shaking bottle of oil
• Boiling a kettle