Nonrandom Music Exploration

One other thing that blew my mind was hearing Herbie Hancock’s Sextant, a 1973 album that was integrated some techno-like-elements into Hancock’s jazz music. I’ve heard lots of Herbie Hancock before, and I knew he did some electronic stuff in Head Hunters and Future Shock but this album caught me off guard, especially with how early it was. Before Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” there was Herbie Hancock’s “Rain Dance.”

This is a noise study I made, running some simple sounds through a lot of distortion and fast modulation to create some interesting and noisy textures.

The most interesting part was the fact that the original piece was a simple chord progression, but slowing it down so much created a cool-sounding texture and turned the chord changes into sound objects that were much more gradual. The chords felt more like full-on modulations than simple chords because they took so much time.

This week I listened to a lot of music that utilizes samples and loops, ranging from early experimental music by composers like Steve Reich to the hip-hop of people like Grandmaster Flash. I also saw this interview with Flash https://youtu.be/m3YXyK-gWvc where he breaks down the his turntable technique that became the foundation of modern hip-hop and rap. It’s really amazing to see him loop specific song sections by moving back and forth between two identical vinyls. It’s the kind of thing I do all the time without thinking about: I can just drag the end of a region in Logic to loop it: but before accessible software like that, Flash developed a system to do it using a 2-record turntable and his hands. (And his transitions are so clean every single time!!)

I rarely ever work with samples of other songs, much less samples this big, so this was interesting to create. It doesn’t feel like it’s super original, as it’s just a bunch of loops made by others that Ableton time/pitch-shifted for me. However I am pretty happy with sound of the result, and it was cool to combine all these songs I love into one object.

This is a dub study I made, based on what I’ve been listening to recently. I took a multitrack of “The Last Stand” by Ikebe Shakedown and made a dub remix of it. The main constraint I had was I couldn’t chop up the audio at all: I had to do everything through effects and automation in Ableton. I ended up splitting the tracks into drums, horns, and guitars and affecting those each differently.

This week I listened to a lot of dub. This is more in my territory than the super early electronic music, and I can see a much more direct connection to the electronic music I usually listen to. In dub I hear a lot of samples used in ways that remind me of trip-hop I’m more familiar with like Massive Attack and Portishead. There is also a huge focus on drums and bass to create a very clear, driving groove which I quite like. One standout for me was “See Mi Yah” by Rhythm & Sound with Willi Williams. I could not get enough of the super low synth bass sound they used, it was so good and worked perfectly to push the song forward. There was also a blanket of reverb over pretty much everything, which gave the song a very spacey, ethereal feel that I really appreciate.

This is an analysis I’m working on of the piece “Switched On” by Manuella Blackburn

This is an acousmatic piece I created for my first 57358 assignment

This is an audio challenge I did to recreate a sound using a different sound. I recorded my gas stove turning on and a pencil snapping in half, then attempted to edit and warp the pencil sound to recreate the stove sound.

It was also interesting to realize how insanely important Bell Labs was to technology in general. I had heard the name before in a computer science context, Bell Labs being where the C programming language came from, but never knew it was so influential in so many different fields, from astrophysics to checkers to electronic music.

I am not very used to this style of composition, and while it was conceptually interesting to create I am not sure that I really like the final product from a listener’s perspective. I generally prefer to let my ear guide me when creating music.

On the more electronic side of things, I am always impressed to hear what Kraftwerk was doing in the 70s and how that would later turn into synth-pop and EDM. I especially enjoyed “The Man Machine” and “Abzug,” with their use of vocoders, drum machines and synth-ostinatos.

This is a musique concrète study I created called Liquidity. It is completely made up of sounds I recorded from around my house and warped in various ways using Adobe Audition. It’s short but I tried to create a sort of ABA structure which ended up as more of an intro-drone-outro type thing.

This week I listened to a ton of very early experimental electronic music. My favorite was probably Pierre Schaeffer’s Etude Violette, which had a lot of strange warped (piano?) sounds unified by a very consistent looping rhythm. I think it showcases how consistent, repetitive rhythms can give a very musical quality to literally anything. Iannis Xenakis’ Concret PH was also a standout: it was quite different, focusing on a very stable and slowly evolving glassy, sprinkly texture. Lastly there was Memory of a Big Room (For Matthew) a fantastic ambient piece by Ellen Fullman and her “Long String Instrument” which I found a great article on https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/01/arts/music/ellen-fullman.html