2023 Semester 1 Composition
Viva Voce
Circuit Bending
I am Sitting in a Guitar
The fabled piece that was never performed (however we were thankfully wise enough to record the rehearsal!)
“I am sitting in a guitar” consists of 3+ players. One player is stationed at an electric guitar, one stationed at a laptop or mixing desk and the rest of the players are on any form of instrument capable of outputting audio via a cable or outputting midi but otherwise being silent. In the case of this recording, there is:
A Hydrasynth, played by Jairen
An Electric Bagpipe midi chanter, played by David Stulpner
A MIDI keyboard played by Bailey Sieracki
As well as
David Whyatt stationed on the guitar and
Nic Manno stationed on a mixing desk
However the most important aspect of this piece is how the equipment is set up. The numbers on the diagram refer to the following
Transducer
Contact Mic
Guitar Pickup Output
Any Instrument Outputs
Inputs on Mixer or Interface
Outputs on Mixer or Interface
Sound system
As you can see, theres a feedback loop created between the transducer receiving signal from the mixer/interface outputs which, through the guitar pickups and contact mic, is sent back to the inputs and therefore back into the transducer again. This strange feedback loops is the heart of this piece.
The instrumentalists should play in the key of D minor. The Computer/Mixer operator is tasked with actively changing levels of the instruments as they see fit as well as applying any effects to any channels, though a delay and limiter is recommended as minimum for the transducer channel to minimise extreme amounts of feedback and clipping. The player stationed on the guitar is to affect the feedback by interacting with the guitar. Examples of this are damping strings to end the feedback loop temporarily, or damping specific strings to change the register of the feedback loop, covering harmonics, changing the transducer position, moving dials to control the guitar pickup sound and generally experimenting to find unique and interesting sounds.
Circuit Bending Project
(Shown in Person)
Sound Mastering
Fredericas Path Recording (Part of final assessment)
As part of our final mastering project, one piece had to be entirely our own recording, mix and master. I had long been wanting to do a cover of Fredericas path to use as a demonstration for my flutes, and so I decided to kill two birds with one stone in this case, completing an assignment and then later making a video for it to put on my website and an upcoming PassionFlute YouTube channel. More than that, though, I decided that after acquiring more equipment, I wanted to do this assignment entirely with my own things or anything that I could easily get a hold of thereby practicing music production in a way that I would actually use every day and getting better in a way that was as directly targeted to my own work process as possible. This presented a secondary challenge. Much of what I do surrounds the use of MIDI instruments and sample libraries and I have long struggled to get recorded sounds and sample libraries to play nicely together. This ultimately, then, led to a project that in reality was killing three birds with one stone. Or perhaps four, I’ve lost count by this point.
The project is made up by a spaced XY recording of my Grandmas piano, a recording of my flute with a ribbon mic and a pair of AB omni room mics and finally a recording of a Conga using a top and bottom mic which were phase aligned plus MIDI instruments. Ultimately the biggest thing I got away from this was using ribbon mics to record my flute. During a class, Lee took us on an excursion to his recording studio where he did a recording on one of my flutes. I absolutely loved it and took the recording home to attempt to replicate it. After many attempts, I simply couldn’t make my mics sound the same, however I ended up having a realisation. When Lee did the recording, I asked him why he was using a medium diaphragm condenser mic on my flute, as I was used to people miking flutes with small diaphragms. He mentioned that he used that mic because it was a dark mic which would minimise the airiness and high frequency harshness that you usually get when miking flute. Originally I thought he was saying that he used a medium diaphragm microphone because of them possessing this trait, but rather he was talking specifically about the microphone he was using. When I realised this, I wondered about using ribbon mics due to them being famously dark, and so I decided to try it with the ribbon microphone in the dungeon studio at WAAPA. To my tastes that microphone was a little too dark, however it solved all the issues I had been having with my flutes. Before testing this, I’d found an sE X1R on clearance at kosmic music for $225, and considering the sE X1R is a much brighter than normal ribbon mic-practically more a neutral leaning towards dark mic-and my opinion that the avantone mic was too bright, I figured it would be perfect and indeed I am very satisfied with it. It arrived just in time for me to be able to rerecord all of my flute bits using it.
Ultimately the hardest part of this assignment was the data loss catastrophe I had in early May. My main drive was accidentally wiped during an operating system update and my hard drive backup had corrupted. Furthermore my secondary cloud backup didnt seem to properly save any of my logic files meaning that I had to start the recording part of this assessment as well as my entire recital (more on that later) from scratch-besides the piano recording which I had done on my laptop and was therefore still intact on my laptop.
Elsaden (2023 Recital)
Conception and Development of Music
Of course, this is a sad tale that ends in the loss of all my work, but lets go back before that to take a look at my original intentions.
I’ve been listening to the soundtrack of various Fire Emblem games as well as Celeste recently and that has gotten me interested in dynamic game music to portray story development. To explain what I mean, Fire Emblem frequently makes use of “dynamic music”-that is music that changes depending on what is going on in the game. Its a fairly simple and straightforward example of this but very effective. In Fire Emblem plays a little like chess, but when two “pieces” go to do battle, in Fire Emblem theres a separate fight scene where nothing is guaranteed and you have no control. In the planning stages where you move your units around, the soundtrack tends to be calmer to allow you to think. However once your units engage in battle, the music changes to a more intense version of itself, fading in and out of these two versions depending on whats going on in the gameplay. Meanwhile Celeste does something somewhat similar. Celeste has a single vary large audio track for its levels where it changes the play position of its audio tracks depending on your progression through the level. I wanted to make a sound track that explored these interesting uses of music as a tool in game design to help tell better stories or more closely represent whats happening on screen without drastic changes between a completely different calm theme and battle theme.
To do this, I needed a game, a story and most importantly leitmotifs. The story would be based on a small book a friend and I had written in high school. A young girl and her mother would be exploring a mystical forest together where they would end up separated and learn that the forest was far more magical than at first believed. The girl would soon learn that her flute now had strange effects on the world around her and the gameplay would revolve around solving puzzles to progress through the area while looking for the girls mother. The game would be made up of many small puzzle rooms with puzzles of varying difficulty and several breaks in between to progress the story. I intend for these breaks to be made up of slide-card style cutscenes which will be simpler and quicker to make.
The overall puzzles would be split into four or five areas with their own themes. There are three main Leitmotifs (potentially more later), the girls theme, the mothers theme and the main theme. These themes are to be reoccurring in small sections throughout the game. I had written these three themes as well as the theme for the first level when the calamity struck
The Great Tragedy
On the 3rd of May I lost all of my main drive files during an update that went wrong and both my local hard drive backup and cloud backup on onedrive were incomplete-critically missing my Logic files. Thankfully only things that were on the main drive of my desktop music making computer were affected, but this included most critically all of the music I’d made for my recital and my mastering assignment meaning that I was now extremely time pressured to get everything done. I had all the melodies I’d written memorised-not to mention having audio recordings of when I first had the ideas for those melodies as well as a draft bounce for level 1 that survived. I made basic files with those melodies in them, but ultimately decided to instead of redo everything from scratch, continue making the game and write music for the game as needed using both to inspire each other instead of making the game from the music leading to the little I was able to do after largely focussing on my mastering assignment.
Development of Game (Integration of Music)
(Shown in person)
Special Topics Unit
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