Melissa's Blog

After my tutorial during class, I was encouraged to continue experimenting and further develop the short pieces I had done. I started today by layering all sorts of different sounds and cutting pieces of audio and changing their order and I think it was an interesting idea. I’m actually beginning a 5th sketch with that idea: I’m cutting up bits from my last sketch (the one with all of my chaotic recordings combined) and rearranging them to see what comes out of it.

This is what the cut-up audio looks like in Logic X, but since I’m not able to upload sound to this blog, you’ll have to listen to it on my SoundCloud playlist I’ll create with my sketches.

In order to encourage experimentation, I want to use the idea I had for my final piece, the idea of war (chaos) followed by reconstruction (order), as one of my sketches to force myself to come up with a more original final piece. I hope this strategy works out for me and stimulates my creativity.

I still have some additional ideas I want to try, but it will have to wait until tomorrow because I am too tired right now and I find that good ideas don’t flow the right way when my mind is distracted.

Today I worked really hard to fix some details on my sketches but I’m still feeling a bit lost regarding the direction I’m supposed to be heading. I hope that as time progresses and I continue to experiment I’ll get more and better ideas of what to do. I’m just trying to explore both of these concepts fully. I wasn’t really satisfied with my 3rd sketch (the one with the pads) because I feel like I’m not taking risks again so I’ll have to find a way to show this idea in a more creative way. I’m also finding my 2nd sketch to be pretty bad. I wasn’t really able to shift the pitch of the accordion because the audio is not very clean. I did manage to do the key change with other instruments which was pretty cool. I’m not sure how to fix it so I’ll just leave it until I’m done with the rest of my sketches

While I don’t particularly enjoy showing my work, I do look forward to hearing of ways to improve my project and maybe get some new ideas from the class. I also like giving others ideas about what their project can be. It’s no lie that your perspective regarding projects that are not your own is much much clearer.

I think I’m done with the past 2 sketches and have begun working on my next 2. The third comes from another track on my playlist called “The Evening Fog”. It’s a very gentle piece of music that uses a lot of synth pads, they usually have a very soft attack (it takes a bit of time for each note to fully sound). I’m attempting to do a simple melody that uses a lot of this kind of sound but I also don’t want to overuse synthetic instruments so I’ll try to add something “real” in there.

The next sketch is inspired by another track in my playlist called “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima”. This piece of music is extremely uncomfortable to listen to because of all of the high-pitched sounds and it actually in inspired by war so I felt it was fitting. I’m currently trying to adopt some elements from it, like recording annoying sounds with the violin and putting together many of my other “chaos” recordings.

I’m also preparing for the class presentation and I’m a bit worried that most of my ideas and sound recordings deal with the concept of chaos. I was previously very confident of the research I had done but it turns out I’m gonna have to investigate some more; hence, I’m in the process of re-evaluating my life notes and trying to come up with other ideas.

Here is a collage of the 2 themes of these 2 sketches I’ve discussed. The first two are very peaceful and beautiful and the other 2 are chaotic and depict total destruction.

I’m currently working on my first 2 sketches. The first is going to imitate some of the techniques used in Akira Yamaoka’s track “Witchcraft” which is part of the soundtrack for a videogame part of the Silent Hill franchise. I absolutely love these soundtracks because of how simple, yet terrifying they are.

“Witchcraft” is a somber track but I find its simplicity to be quite charming and when the beat comes in (at around the halfway point), it really gives the sound a definite shape which makes me associate it with order whilst not straying far from my main theme of war, which is very important to me. I’m trying to choose music that fits more or less what I’m planning to do and although I could be wrong, for now I don’t want to distract myself too much with upbeat tracks.

I know it should only be around 7 seconds but I can’t help but make it longer almost without thinking. I’ve made up my mind to leave it as it is and only come back to it after finishing the rest of my sketches.

The second one I’m working on is influenced by a song I’ve recently added to my playlist. It’s called “Rebuilding/ Goodbye Old Friend”. I actually found this one by accident while attempting to find another track from my playlist but I liked this one even more. It’s from the soundtrack of an X-men movie. The part that inspired me is at around 1 minute in. It’s a very subtle key change that I’m currently obsessed with because of the change in colour. I finally figured out that the key had changed by a semitone so I was able to replicate it in other keys.

I’m thinking about mixing this idea with one of my audio recordings, the “Accordion” one. I could try to manipulate the pitch of the instrument to make it change keys. I’m excited to begin experimenting with this new idea.

This is the movie that includes the track I discussed. When I watched it I didn’t even notice its music but I’m glad I discovered it in the end.

At this point in time I have already done most of my research but due to some needed clarification, my blog had a somewhat late start.

In order to collect the needed research I first had to have a good idea of the concept I would be representing. As I mentioned, I researched the London Blitz and found some interesting pictures on the internet showing the before and after the modern era and you could really appreciate all of the efforts people made to rebuild their city. The concept of war has always fascinated me so I began thinking more about what I could possibly do (musically) with this new idea.

I didn’t get a lot of thinking time because I was supposed to present my research for the following week already so I just borrowed a recording device from the Loan Store and went to London on that weekend.

Honestly, I was supposed to go to London either way because of a concert I wanted to attend so it didn’t feel like a chore at all. I was looking around the city and I noticed a lot of buildings under construction so it brought me back to the internet images I had seen. I thought of combining the concepts of war and the burden of having to rebuild your city and your life after war.

I recorded the sounds that these constructions created and took pictures of the buildings undergoing maintenance and edited them to make them appear older to better communicate this idea of war.

After getting home, I began experimenting with ideas of my own and tried to imitate the sounds and feelings of some tracks I discovered during this process of investigating. Some of them will probably be used to create sketches for the ten that I need to come up with so I’ll be able to elaborate on the most significant ones in the coming days. I just basically played some calm music (to represent the end of war but also the mental strains it leaves on you) and more stressful and unnerving music (chaos or war). I also tried to copy the sounds of airstrikes and bomb warnings using a violin. These recordings will be made available on my SoundCloud playlist titled “Sound Recordings”.

I’ve included one more image from my online research regarding the Blitz (bottom right) and the rest are just some pictures I took during my trip. I felt they represented well the concept of destruction and reconstruction, which is the main theme I’m working with.

(I couldn’t figure out how to add audio samples of what I was writing , but all my sounds are on the playlist linked on the PDF of this project).

For this project I have chosen to do Order and Chaos after much consideration. At first, I was planning to do the Cities project and I got drawn towards the London Blitz during WW2. I started investigating this happening and wanted to focus on how a city rebuilds itself after war. I then noticed that this idea fit a lot better with the Order and Chaos brief so that’s why I changed my mind.

It was also relevant that the outline for this project was somewhat different from the previous ones (the 10 short audio clips as opposed to five 30-second musical ideas). This gives me a lot more room to experiment without having to dedicate a lot of time to ideas that didn’t inspire me too much.

I also felt that these two phenomena (Order and Chaos) can be regularly found expressed in music and there is therefore much more to be discovered and a greater variety of examples to analyse.

This blog is dedicated to record my thoughts and feelings while I attempt to come up with a convincing and personal example regarding this very narrative.

This is one of the images I looked at while researching the war. It depicts a combination of an image of the Holborn Circus Statue in London taken during the war and in our present day. It’s truly shocking to see the comparison in this way.