Week 9 Forum - Tristan Louth-Robins

In our forum session for this week masters student Tristan Louth-Robins gave us a presentation on his work. His study has been influenced from Alvin Lucier an experimental "composer". Alvin's main work is a piece called I Am Sitting In A Room. This piece is created by recording the words "I am sitting in a room". The recording is played back and re-recorded many, many times. Eventually, all that is heard in the recording is the resonant frequencies of the room.

This is an interesting idea but in no way would I consider it composition. I also feel this idea is puffed up to make it more intuitive than it actually is. The final resultant sound isn’t worth the effort. This is so common in sound artists we study in the conservatorium. “Composers” are glorified for their music because it is different. It doesn’t sound good so why is it so great?

Tristan’s work revolves around using teapots to resonate the frequencies. The underlying concepts are basically the same. I feel Tristan is very knowledgeable in his chosen field and I hope he can make it more interesting than the majority of the “composers” we’ve studied in the last year and a half.


[1] Tristan Louth-Robins. 'Music Technology Forum Presentation - EMU Space'.
Lecture presented in the EMU Space, Electronic Music Unit, University
Of Adelaide, 26th April 2007

CC2 Week 9 - Data Management & Application Control

I couldn't do this week's patch so here's my attempt. Big thanks to Ben who helped me out. My patch can record data into coll but plays back the wrong notes. It sounds great but is not what's I wanted obviously. Then number boxes I have coming out of stripnote show that the correct values are going through the gates but I have no idea why it's not working.

For some reason every computer I have used in the Audio Lab has started using Cubase fine and then crashes and asks for the authorization (i.e. dongle). This happened as I finished my patch so the sound source in my mp3 is from Reason. I have attached my original Cubase session file which was working fine earlier. I spent as much time as I could on this week's CC before I went mad.




Here is an mp3 and my patch
mp3 File
Max Patch
Cubase Session
Reason File


[1] Christian Haines. "Creative Computing: Semester 1, Week 9; Data Management & Application Control" Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 10th May 2007.

AA2 Week 9 - Mixing Part 2

This week I was all pumped to do a completely different remix of Drama Queen. I was thinking of doing either a chilled house remix or an upbeat drum 'n' bass remix. When I went to Studio 2 the soft synths in Logic were not working for some reason. I then went to Studio 5 to use the Native Instruments, but couldn't work out how to get sound to the speakers and also the MIDI wasn't working. By this time I was stressed and had lost all my enthusiasm so I decided to just work on the ProTools session.

I spent quite a bit of time working on the vocals and trying to isolate them to sound good. I know the exercise was to only use the vocals as a guide, but after hearing many of Ben's mixes I saw that it was possible to make them sound good. I have no idea how Ben did it but I just couldn't work it out. I tried using distortion, compression, EQ, de-esser but nothing worked for me.

In this mix I got rid of many of the guitar tracks because I though there was just way too much. I changed the type of distortion and added some delays to the main lead. I also made use of the guitar riffs at the end of the session and cut them up and matched it to the song.

One very stupid thing I did was spend lots of time aligning two guitar parts and was pulling my hair out wondering why they were out of time. Then I realised I have a delay on one of the tracks that I forgot about! Grrrrhh! That was a waste of an hour!

I have a guitar wah effect on one of the main guitar parts, which complements the other part. I think the idea is good but the overall sound isn't the best because I had to work out which riff goes with each part of the song and I didn't know what the notes were. So, because it was all by ear it was time consuming and not always matching perfectly.

I have a screenshot of my mixer window to see the effects and an mp3 of the final mix both with and without vocals.

I know, there's a bit of clipping

Mix with vocals [4.1MB]

Mix without vocals [4.1MB]


[1] David Grice "Audio Arts: Semester 1, Week 9; Mixing" Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, 8th May 2007.