Submission Type: Show assignment
Composition 1 – Nature’s Call
For this first composition, I was inspired by the sounds of nature and wanted to capture the diverse sonic landscape of rural woodland areas within the piece. I used a Zoom H5 microphone, which is a portable microphone that allowed me to record freely outside. I spent multiple hours recording the various sounds that would go mostly unnoticed, for example: twigs breaking, leaves rustling, and the various calls of the diverse birds and built up a large folder of sounds to play with. My idea was to start the piece where I would begin my walk and end it where I would, with the sounds of the river bookending it. Another idea I had was attempting to blend the natural world with the electronic, manipulating the sounds in a way that would make them unrecognisable after a certain amount of time. I wanted this to follow a general climax pyramid shape, starting with the untouched natural sound and slowly building into more manipulated sound before sloping back down into the natural sounds again. I also wanted to experiment with perspective in the piece using the recorded sounds to achieve a level of foreground and background depth, with a lot of the birds and general ambience being manipulated with more reverb and GRM Freeze, and the closer noises like footsteps and leaves crunching being drier and more rhythmically altered.
My DAW of choice to create the composition was Cubase, and the GRM tools effects were used throughout the piece, as well as some Arturia and Soundtoys effects. In terms of the GRM tools I used:
-GRM Delays
-GRM Shuffling
-GRM Reson
-GRM PitchAccum
-GRM Freeze
These plugins served as powerful tools to manipulate the recorded sounds, helping me to blur the lines between the natural and synthesised. I made extensive use of the modulation of these plugins’ parameters throughout this piece to try to give the music a sense of randomness and unpredictability and stop the sounds from feeling static. GRM Delays, especially, was a great tool to modulate the X and Y axis, creating some rhythmic instability and intrigue
In terms of inspirations for this composition, I was heavily influenced by Robert Dow’s “When All Is Silent”. I personally love the sound of flowing water and the sound of birds, and I believe this composition utilises them beautifully, with just the right balance of natural sound and sound manipulation. The final product is a composition that is serene and calming. Whereas my composition feels a little more unsettling and uneasy, this may be down to the choice of sounds and the heavy manipulation in parts.
Composition 2 – Breakfast
For this composition, my idea was to record the process of making breakfast and to capture the process, rearrange it into a composition. I also believed this could act as a nice contrast to the first piece, being much more based around electronic and mechanical objects rather than the natural and living sounds of the woodland. Like the first piece, I recorded the raw sounds using the Zoom H5 microphone; its portability made it easy to navigate and record around the kitchen while trying to cook at the same time. I recorded various objects and appliances throughout my kitchen, for example: toaster mechanisms, hob switches, kettle, and microwave. frying pan, chopping sounds, tap sounds, fan sounds, etc.
My composition starts off with the sound of a boiling kettle, which is a subtle tie-in to composition 1, both starting and ending with different capacities of energised, bubbling water. Sounds like sizzling food, mechanical switches and other mechanisms were fun sounds to work with and had a lot of potential for manipulation.
I again created this composition in Cubase and made use of mainly the GRM tools to manipulate the raw materials. The following GRM tools were used:
-GRM Delays
-GRM Shuffling
-GRM Reson
-GRM PitchAccum
-GRM Freeze
I used much more GRM Reson here than in composition 1, partly because my work was inspired by Alistair Macdonald’s “Dreel”, in which he makes use of resonant filters to manipulate metallic sounds. I wanted to take this same approach to some of my metallic sounds, like, for example, the stainless steel pot lid closing and opening, which already had a resonant quality:
Another approach I took to the composition was blending sustained sounds and shorter sounds. I used my recordings of the sustained sounds in my kitchen, fan, fridge hum and kettle and morphed them to create drones and a bed of sound that the rest of the composition could sit on top. I also made heavy use of modulating the GRM tools’ parameters, helping to achieve a sense of movement and evolution across the work.
As well as drawing inspiration from Alistair Macdonald’s “Dreel” I also drew some inspiration from Manuella Blackburn’s “Ice Breaker” for its sonic quality, and use of extremely close recordings, which I also tried to achieve when recording sounds like the sizzling of the frying pan.
The process of making these compositions was very enjoyable and allowed me to step away from my traditional compositional methods and take a fresh approach to composing. I will definitely be integrating these compositional techniques into my workflow in the future and especially the GRM tools, as I believe they are very versitle and can be applied to a variety of styles.
