Week 4

This week in Studio 2 we spent more time on routing signal to different places. Understanding how this studio works is starting to get a bit tricky for me and I still need a lot more practice learning how to use the digital mixing desk. [1]

In Creative Computing we spent most of the time looking at Peak. I have used Peak a fair bit in previous courses so this class was more of a memory refresh on using the basic features. I found it helpful when Christian went through Normalising. I have used normalizing a lot but wasn’t 100% how I was effecting my sound files. It helped to learn exactly was normalizing does to a sound. The Blending effect was also very helpful. This was a feature I haven’t used before. [2]

We didn’t have a guest speaker this week. Instead David Harris played a number of different pieces, some being his own compositions from the early 90s. I have noticed that whenever we listen to music in Forum (this week and in previous weeks) they are always weird, abstract pieces that in my opinion lack structure, feeling, and music convention. It is sometimes good to break boundaries of music convention and produce music that is original. But, only if it sounds good. Music is subjective so there is no “correct” opinion on how music is supposed to sound, but I have to say that I haven’t liked too many of the pieces that has been presented to us.

Music is supposed to create emotion to the listener and I feel that these pieces so far have purely been for the purpose of intellectual study. As a student of Music Technology I have had some experience with experimentation of electronic music (I still have a long way to go) and I can appreciate innovative ideas (such as bowing a bass guitar, feedback, etc). But the musicians we’ve listened to that have tried these new ideas have done so and not thought about playing a really nice sounding piece of music. The pieces are very repetitive with random sounds and they don’t “touch me” or entice me to keep on listening. There’s no anticipation, which I believe is very important in music. In other words these pieces put me to sleep.

The first piece we listened to was “Surf Music 2 by Jack Vees”.[3] This piece was very repetitive and not very musical. It also went for an extremely long time (I didn’t time the piece but another student told me it was 21 minutes). The instruments used were bass guitar and a synthesizer (I think it was an analogue synth). I could hear a fair bit of modulation and filters throughout the piece. I also heard some feedback, which produced an interesting sound.

The next piece was Fog Trope II by Ingrid Marshall. This was written for a string quartet and I really enjoyed the sound of this piece. This piece had some really nice sounding strings with dynamics. There was also an airy ambient background sound, and a nice sharp bass which I think sounded great. There were other sounds like bird sounds, beeps, and possibly a voice through a vocoder.

David Harris played us two of his compositions. The first was on the piano. This piece was performed on the low end of the piano and was a repeating bass line with some variations. It was performed quite loud. My favorite part of this piece was at the very end when the piece ended and all the harmonics of the notes played previously echoed throughout the room. It was a really nice ambient sound. [4]

The next piece by David had strings predominately and also other sounds like vocal breathing (a hiss sound) and in the background it sounded like doors were opening and closing. This piece was broken up into three sections and it ended with a long glissando. Overall I did like this piece.[5]

[1] Christian Haines. 'Audio Arts Lecture - Studio 2'. Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, 21st March 2006.

[2] Christian Haines. 'Creative Computing Lecture - Audio Lab'. Lecture presented at the Audio Lab, University of Adelaide, 23rd March 2006.

[3] Jack Vees. 'Bigraphical Material', Leisure Planet Music, http://www.leisureplanetmusic.com/composer/vees/bio.htm (Accessed 27/03/2006)

[4] David Harris. 'Elder School of Music', The University of Adelaide http://www.music.adelaide.edu.au/staff/composition/david_harris.html (Accessed 27/03/2006)

[5] David Harris. "Music Technology Forum Lecture - EMU Space". Lecture presented in the EMU Space, Electroninc Music Unit, University of Adelaide, 23rd March 2006.