New Album Release: sans jamais ni demain

I’ve just released a new album on Bandcamp: sans jamais ni demain. It’s a collection of experimental electronic music and recent explorations. Nothing grandiose, but I felt the need to update my bandcamp and share what I’ve been working on. A little more details about the songs:

the longing for repetition

“Happiness is the longing for repetition.”
---Milan Kundera

This is a song I made for CT-One Minute. All sounds are derived from a 10-second bass clarinet phrase sample that can be downloaded freely from the Philharmonia Orchestra's website. The sample was played back at various playback rates, forward and backward, through various envelopes using the Samplewiz sampler on my iPod. This performance was recorded in one take with all looping and effects done in samplewiz. No further editing or effects except for copy and pasting the beginning at the end to bring closure to the piece.
I approached samplewiz as a livelooper, since, in "note hold" mode, every note on the keyboard can be seen as a track on a multi-track looper (each with a different playback rate). For this piece, I used the forward and backwards loop settings in the wave window, so things get go sound a bit different. I added some delay and messed with the envelope and it started to sound nice. Once I had a good bed of asynchronous loops, I left "note hold" by tapping rather than swiping the control box (this kept the held notes). I then changed the settings around and played over the loops without "overdubbing".
Samplewiz is quite powerful... You can also change the loop start and end points in between notes to add variety, without affecting the notes that are already being held.

tutus de chemin

This is the soundtrack for a short film I made in a weekend with my wife. I started with a vocal recording of my wife that I sent through Paul's Extreme Sound Stretch. The resulting audio file was played back as a looop in Bidule. I sent the audio to a pitch shifting plug-in (I believe I was using PitchWheel at the time) and then to a midi gate group and finally to the Mobius looper. I performed the sounds two-handed on my Trigger Finger. One hand was controlling a fader that was assigned to pitch shifting and the other was triggering pads to control the midi gate (the note envelope) and various functions in Mobius.

Three of a kind

This piece started out as an assignment for a course in Electroacoustic composition I took at SFU a few years ago.  The sound source was a homemade instrument, but everything was mangled and cut-up.  This piece features heavy use of the short loop fabrication technique familiar to readers of this blog.  I used Acid to assemble everything and add some effect automation throughout the piece.

le train

This is the soundtrack to a short animation film I made last year.  I used Soundgrain to isolate parts of the original sound's spectrum and used that software to create loops that I mixed  while recording.  I think this musical cutup is well-matched with the visual cutup it was meant to accompany.

Game music

This songs was made using my soon to be released iOS app: BreakOSC!  This app is a game that sends OSC messages based on in-game events.  In this case, when the ball hit blue and green bricks, Bidule triggered four instances of iZotope's Iris.  The paddle served as a cross-fader and mixed all those sounds together.  The results were sent to a generous amount of reverb courtesy of Audio Damage's Eos.

sans jamais ni demain

Another composition I made for the aforementionned course in electroacoustic composiiton I took at SFU.  The only sound source for this piece is a recording of myself reading an old poem I wrote in high-school.  The slow moving textures were made by isolating parts of those words, slowing them down and layering them over each other to create very long notes of varying pitch that fade in and out over time.  The more rythmic stuff I made using a now familiar technique.

July 8 2011

This piece is a recording of a live (from my basement) performance of what will one day become my meta-trombone.  A short loop is created at the top (what is heard twice in the beginning) and then altered in different ways determined by trombone performance.

Twice through the looking glass

This song was also made for CT-One Minute using the exact same sound source as the longing of repetition. This time, however, I used Iris to change the character of the sound and created two different sound patches.  I made two recordings with each of these patches by triggering the sounds with my new Pulse controller.  My three-month old daughter also took part by adding her own surface hitting contributions, making this our first father-daugther collaboration.  Once I had made these two recordings, I brought them in Bidule and placed them into Audio file players.  The amplitude of output of each player was controlled via faders on my Trigger Finger and the result was recorded to file.

New composition

Here’s a new musique concrète composition I’ve put together using only sounds from my previously discussed home-made instrument.  It’s not much, but you can dance to it…



My next musical project is an album of electro-acoustic music based on scenes from horror movies.  I’ve personally been marked by a series of traumatic horror scenes in my youth, and I’m sure I’m not the only one.  The idea is to create each songs using sounds made from objects found in the scene in question.  I’m hoping that tying my songs to some emotionally charged memories will help them succeed and provide some thematic unity to the whole work.  I’m open to suggestions, if you want to nominate your favourite scene.

Learning stuff online

The web is a great resource when it comes to learning stuff. Google has become my default reference library for everything from DIY projects to black holes. But as much as I like the immediacy of information that the web provides, the lack of coherent presentation and the ease with which one enquiry can lead to another is not always conducive to in-depth learning. One of my defining traits as a person is that I find everything interesting. The web’s very structure panders to my tendency to follow every thread to its next logical point. Anyone who’s spent any amount of time on Wikipedia going from one article to the next (starting with Pluto and ending with spaghetti) will know what I mean.
One strategy I’ve developed over the years to make sure my focus stays in one place long enough to learn something is to take a course.  I’ve taken a number of courses (university and otherwise) in a number of subjects and I will continue to do so.  A course brings me the structure I would otherwise lack.  Scheduled class time and assignments deadlines ensure that I will put in the work, do the reading and show up to learn…  otherwise I could easily get interested in something else (or, worse, spend my time writing poetry).  I find that the time requirements for a single course are usually manageable and allow me plenty of free time to explore other interests as they arise.
This summer I’m taking my first online course. It’s a course in electro-acoustic composition from Simon-Frasier University.  Here is the first composition I produced for this course:



It’s more of a study than a full-out creative outburst…  but I still like it.  I made used of my previously mentioned loop-making technique to create this song using only vocal sound source.
This online learning experience has been very positive so far. In fact, I’m thinking of taking more online courses in the future.
One concern I have is getting my money’s worth. The web is notorious for education scams luring suckers to spend good money on digitized copies of public domain books. Although I think I’m a rather sophisticated web reader and I wouldn’t fall for most of the scams out there, I’m sure there are sophisticated thieves devising sophisticated scams. In the words of an old friend who has since disappeared: just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean that they’re not out to get you.
Another issue is finding courses.  It’s easy enough to find courses on topics that already interest me.  For instant, I was able to find the following music courses without too much trouble:
Music for the Media
Sound Design for the Electronic Musician
Sound Design
All expensive, but certainly interesting.  The web page for the second one features an endorsement apparently from the professor of my current course. 
But, what about all the stuff out there that might interest me, even though I don’t currently know that it does/might/will?  What am I missing out on?  How do I discover more online courses on topics I’m not even looking for?  Do I have to read through every university website?  Maybe.  I can also use Einztein.
Einztein (http://einztein.com/) is a directory of freely available course materials from universities worldwide.  Browsing through Einztein, I’ve created a shortlist of 27 courses that I’d like to take on subjects as varied as Astronomy (outside the solar system), Navigation, Calculus, Information, News writing, Filmmaking, Photography, contemporary arts, jazz composition, typography, ear training, screenwriting and more (including furniture making).
What materials you get vary from course to course and from university to university.  Sometimes, you get only a syllabus, a reading list and assignments.  Sometimes, you get video of every lecture.  You never know what you're going to get.  It’s like a box of chocolates.  For the mind.
The course I’m most excited about is one on Douglas Hofstadter’s Gõdel, Escher, Bach from MIT.  I can’t wait to read that wonderful book once again with the aid of someone who’s put considerably more time than I’ll ever have learning the concepts it presents.  Good times.