sound design
bing crosby remixed
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I gave an assignment to a group of aspiring sound designers not too long ago. The task was to take two completely different tracks of music and find a way to make them work together and sound somewhat uniform using only editing, transposition and time compression/expansion. They all had an afternoon to complete it. Here’s my ‘remixed’ example. Even caught some of the ii-V harmony in the second half!
Thanks to choreographer Cherice Barton for asking me to attempt this in the first place! It was a fun experiment. Makes me think what other wild juxtapositions are out there waiting for discovery.
sound design for dance
Last summer at the Banff Centre for the Arts, I met a brilliant choreographer Aszure Barton. I was blown away when I first saw company in rehearsal and was fortunate enough to sneak into her Ballet commissioned by the NBOC (The National Ballet of Canada) in Toronto. This past weekend she asked me for some help with the sound editing and design for her recent premiere at The Juilliard School and her current European Tour. I saw the performance on opening night and was so glad to have been able to contribute to the production.
After now having seen a handful of her work, I am particularly inspired by how she employs counterpoint – her content is so compositional and ripe with richness. If you have the opportunity to catch a performance of hers, it will certainly not disappoint. I look forward to next time already, and I have something new to study for it’s compositional content – choreology!
Here’s a little sample of her work with her company, a piece that I saw them work on intensively and worked on the touring production, it’s an excerpt of “Busk”.
the bonus track for the 2009 compilation
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Every year, the Banff Centre releases a compilation album of all the best recordings from the International Workshop in Jazz and Creative Music, fittingly they title it “Centre Pieces”. And yes, that’s centre - the Canadian spelling of “center” :-)
Artistic Director, composer and trumpeter extraordinaire Dave Douglas asked me to create a remix track as an addition to this year’s jazz compilation album. In doing so, I recorded as many sounds as I could from the participants during my time at the workshop. All in all, I sifted through approximately 8 gigs of source material all of which were recorded with nothing more than my pocket-sized field recorder (the Sony PCM-D50 to be exact).
Then the fun began!!
I loaded everything up in a session and played around with all the various individual sound bites. Please note: everything on this track is ‘programmed’ – that is to say these clips were all live, acoustic, and improvised recordings. They were then later re-sliced, effected and synced in an entirely new context quite unique from their original:
Featured on this track is original sound from these musicians:
(in order of appearance)
Adam Miller – Tablas
Michal Vanoucek – ‘Extended’ Piano
Brian Seligman – Acoustic Guitar
Ryan Butler – Electric Guitar
Anu Junnonen – Voice
music for television
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Here’s a little concoction intended for some sort of television broadcast. Who knows what may or may not come of these little mini demos, but they’re kinda fun to try. It’s neat thinking like a film composer especially when there is no film immediately in front of you. In fact, that’s how they used to do it back in the day.
This one sounds like it has the flavor of something dark and tribal – kinda like a urban-exotic background theme or something else along those lines. Check out this previous post, where I put on the same kind of ‘music for TV’ hat.
*thanks to Dan Porter for mastering this track!
programmed drums & piano II
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Friend and composer Darren Miller recently wrote a series of several short pieces for the digital player piano – in fact, for the very same instrument I wrote something for last fall – (see previous post here). This time, I asked Darren to give me the audio he recorded from the player piano – I felt driven to add drums and other misc percussion to his piece. After many wakeful nights tucked away behind samplers, I constructed this little hybrid.
There are hundreds of samples used in this piece, some of which originated from the drums of Nasheet Waits , Eric MacPherson and Jim Black. (see previous post “Nancarrow Arrangement” and This Mention on Post Classic). I took it further this time, employing drummer Max Goldman in the studio one afternoon – I recorded him performing all sorts of techniques across 2 drum kits, plus additional percussion improvisations. He is the drummer featured the most in this little experiment.
Look at this sort of thing like this: take a bundle of magazines, cut out letters from various attractive headlines and then piecing it all together to create a collage-like message. Today, composers are able to utilize attractive “found-sound” audio bits in very much the same way as drawing notes to a page. It’s the same process, different interface! One helps the other.
