gold coast for a swim
Swim at the Gold Coast today – water a perfect temp and the waves were just right for an old bloke like me to bob about in. Elevating tacky to a new level of charm.
music by brute force
I quite like ‘brute force’ methods over computational methods sometimes – but I think I’m about due to update my coding skills and change. Anyways AllDaySleep on Disquiet Junto asked about my last piece so I though I’d show what I did (in the laziest way possible as finishing the potting shed beckons)
Two methods both of which work with the original sound Marc gave us – carving the time-frequency spectrum and narrow band construction of sounds.
Here’s pic of the time-frequency spectrum of the waves recording – the sound is the bright bits and the black holes are where I’ve carved sound away. Note that time is running left to right and frequency from low(bottom of pic) to high(top of pic)
You can see I’ve cut out quite a bit. Then I assembled very narrow slices to make ‘chords’, although more like harmonic structures than trad chords. I just use the selection tool to isolate a narrow band across the whole file and then paste that to a new file – select another frequency and merge that with the first one, etc etc. And of course you can carve into that as well
finally I mix those two techniques together – actually I mix a few examples of each of those, but the effect could be created on a single file if you wanted to work that way – which I must try sometime. I imagine it would end up a different result , I tend to think work methods are important, and ‘most efficient’ or ‘quickest’ is not necessarily better in terms of pleasure or result. This way has me listening with a fair bit of concentration to detail – but a quicker way to generate the ‘chordal’ files to listen to would be better so I am investigating that. Here’s a combination of the two techniques
another disquiet piece
A new disquiet piece this might be my last one for a while – semester getting even closer and I want to work on some other pieces – in particular the Lullaby piece for piano. Been a great inspiration for me
disquiet and soundcloud
really enjoying the disquiet group on soundcloud – Marc Weidenbaum ( = disquiet.com) sets up some compositional ‘restraints’ – I’d call them constraints which I guess reflects my science/cognition background – and the group members respond or not. Lots of great aspects to this – Disquiet ( and soundcloud generally) gives me the best outlet for my music that I’ve come across, and I get to discover an incredible amount of new music that I like.
Here’s the latest one from me
coding
Coding in Matlab today for a new piece based on Brahms Lullaby. Boy am I out of practice but managed to put something together. AND I fixed some old code so no idea how many of my previous “files and variations” pieces were not what I thought. But they were still variations based on permutations of the original material, and then edited til I liked them so not to worry. I’m very excited by this piece – the early parts are sounding good – slow and measured, nothing extraneous.
name change
when our daughter was about 12 she added a middle name. I have always wished she had kept her original middle-less name, but.. Anyways I am thinking of changing my name, although I will wait a few months yet. But Gary Glen Geoffrey strikes me as a good solid name for a man of my age and background
5 favourite sounds for 2011
this is for the Jez Riley French blog where he asks people to submit their five favourite sounds for 2011.
Here are some sounds that I enjoyed for various reasons – some because I love the sound, some because I love the time around the sound. There’s lots of others of course and maybe I like them even more.
1. Wedgie snoring – as our dog gets older he gets more and more grandpa like, from nodding off in front of the TV to snoring when he sleeps
wedgie snoring in the lounge room
2. creaking floors at Kangarilla – recorded in a beautiful cottage in Kangarilla South Australia – there were a lot of great sounds from the floors and doors, as well as an old pedal organ that I recorded in detail
kangarilla creaking the floor
3. Angus bath noises – an old recording that I recovered to make my son a present of sounds from his childhood. Here Angus plays a tube into the bath, when he was probably about 9 years old or maybe younger
angus bath music excerpt
4. flood mud – we had some spectacular floods in Brisbane at the beginning of the year – we are close the river, but were about 3 houses away from getting flooded. Here is the sound of walkiing in some flood mud
yeronga floods-walking through bixa lane mud
5. turkey – goreme balloon flight – Had a wonderful holiday with my son to Turkey. This is some sounds from up in a hot air balloon over Goreme in Cappadocia
goreme balloon jets