Zip It

I was first inspired to make ‘Zip It’ by Manuella Blackburn’s ‘Ice Breaker’. When I first heard the idea of building an electroacoustic piece from just one source material, I knew exactly what to do. When going about my life, I had begun to notice how interesting the sound a zip made was. It creates an incredibly textural sound that is completely different depending on its size, the length of the zipper, the object depth the zip was a part of, and the speed in which it has been pulled. I also investigated the drawn diagrams that Blackburn discusses in ‘The Visual Sound-Shapes of Spectromorphology: an illustrative guide to composition‘ and tried to draw my own diagrams to base the different sections of my piece on. 

With the Zoom H5 mic, I recorded as many different zip textures that I could. I ended up with many recordings and went through each, listening to them thoroughly so I could label them with a description of the sound they made – this would make the editing process a lot easier as I could just grab “fast zip” when I needed a bit more movement or “crunchy zip” when I wanted a more distorted texture. The list of recordings I used are as follows:

1. Deep Zip
2. Big Zip
3. Clinking of Zips
4. Coat Zip
5. Crunchy Zip
6. Fast, Aggressive Zip
7. Fast, Long Zip
8. Hard Zip
9. Laptop Case Zip
10. Slow Zip
11. Wash Bag Zip
12. Zip for Violin Case
13. Zip 1, 2 and 3 

From the diagram I drew, my aim was to start with an “attack” sound – start to have it build more as it becomes more sustained and then bring in the edited audio. I began just layering some raw zip audio and having that transition into the clinking sounds of zips to add a higher frequency. It’s a slow start to give the piece a place to go later as more edited textures come in. As the piece starts to increase in pace with the faster zip pulls, I added in some audio that had been transposed down to give the zip a more guttural, “monster-esque” sound. I then utilised GRM tools to give the audio some interesting effects. GRM Reson allowed me to identify a certain frequency and bring it to the forefront and have that ring across the piece. GRM Delays paired with a reverb bus that my audio was sent through, helped create an incredibly strange, “alien” sound. Two and a half minutes in, I created a bus that has both GRM Combfilter on it and a heavy EQ and I have a zip audio track being increasingly sent through that to create a zip that sounds like it’s getting further away and put in a wider space. Two minutes and fifty seconds in, I used GRM Freeze to create a zip sound that continued throughout the rest of the piece to add a consistent texture; however, I played with the pitch so that it’s slowly adjusting and blending with the other zip sounds. GRM Doppler helped my audio feel like it was moving around a space. On top of GRM tools, I also used EQ, compression and alchemy. EQ allowed me to boost and cut certain frequencies and also make the audio sometimes feel like it was in a smaller space. I also played around with putting some zip audio into alchemy and changing different parameters until I came up with an interesting sound that I liked. At one point, I also layered the same audio, but transposed it differently three times to make a louder, busier sound that felt very intense. I wanted the piece to end on a fast attack and feel slightly bookended, so I used the raw audio of various “fast zip pulls” and layered them to create one big, fast zip pull.

Unlearning an Instrument

Listening to Monty Adkin’s electroacoustic tracks inspired this second piece. His work – particularly ‘Memory Box‘ – starts out acousmatic and “becomes more distant and blurry as electronic processing becomes more pronounced” (Bentall, 2026) . This helped me come up with the source for my second piece: instruments but played not in the conventional, musical way. This allowed me to have harmonic textures without falling into the trap of making it sound like a song. The list of recordings I used are as follows:

1. Rubber Thumbs on Steel Drum
2. Circling Steel Drum
3. Clinking on Steel Drum
4. Keys on Steel Drum
5. Plucking Violin Strings
6. Wood on Violin Strings
7. Guitar Harmonics
8. Bowed Guitar
9. Violin Bow Under Guitar Strings
10. Slider on Guitar
11. Hitting Body of Guitar
12. Nails on Guitar Body
13. Plectrum Scratching Guitar Strings
14. Muted Plucking
15. Strings at Head of Guitar
16. Pan Flute

I had originally made this piece very sectional with it flowing from one singular instrument into another. However, this made the final product feel quite bitty and lacked the intrigue and ambient-like feel of Adkins’ piece. So, with this in mind, I strayed from my initial inspiration and started to randomly dot GRM tools around my piece seeing what sounds I could create and putting them in places throughout that would either add into the attack of a certain section or add some different frequencies into parts that felt very thin and sparse.

Much like my previous piece, I used GRM Doppler, Combfilter, Freeze, Reson and Delay; and I played around with sends and sending something to a bus with a big reverb tail to control when it used reverb. Again, I used intense EQ to bring out and control certain frequencies. However, this time I also played around with reversing audio which brought an intriguing rhythm to the piece.

My Pieces:

Everything I have learnt through the electroacoustic module has been incredibly useful. My listening skills have improved greatly and my music knowledge has broadened. I have found myself hearing certain noises and being intrigued by their texture or pitch and wanting to record them. I have also learnt from working on my two pieces that things don’t always go according to plan. I had started out with two clear references and ideas of where I wanted to take each piece and ended up adapting and changing it the more I listened to it. When putting a sound into the GRM tools, I never knew what I was going to get and I learnt to embrace it. These pieces have taught me a lot about sound manipulation, rhythm, pitch and electroacoustic music; and this module has definitely made me a better musician overall.

Bibliography

Adkins, M (2011). Memory Box. Fragile.Flicker.Fragment. [Digital Album].

Bentall, R (2026). Electroacoustic Composition: Week 14. 

Blackburn, M (2011). The Visual Sound-Shapes of Spectromorphology: an illustrative guide to composition. Liverpool: Department of Music, p.7
Blackburn, M (2015). Ice Breaker. Petites étincelles. [Digital Album].