This week we went back over the critereas for this project and went through some some of the crit for people who weren’t able to play last session. I particularly liked Vic’s track based on 8 recordings of a snare composition that she said she was suprised the didn’t have the technical ability to play anymore, because she couldnt get the octo ring setup working the snare channels all blended into this huge stampede of sound, I found it quite an exciting accident.
As for my own progress, I tried again to get the quad setup working to no avail, I am guessing there is something wrong with the setup or maybe I’m just doing something horribly wrong. Something I did change though is I found a sample that I think was the missing piece holding everything together, I rewatched the ITV documentary “The Man With The 7 Second Memory”, which is about Clive Wearing who’s memory span was reduced to 7-30 seconds, meaning that he was constantly restarting, waking up after every 20 seconds or so.
I am sampling a collection of voicemails that he left Deborah (his wife) of mostly his overwhelming excitement that he wants to see her again, which because of his amnesia would not be very far apart. My intention with using this sample is to get across a kind of infinite divine love even while immobile, or as Clive says, dead.
(Interviewer) “Is it very hard?” , (Clive) “No. It’s exactly the same as being dead, which is not difficult, is it? To be dead is easy. You don’t do anything at all. You can’t do anything, when you are dead. It’s been the same. Exactly.”
I made the decision to remove the clarity from the Kath Bloom sample using EQ and Reverb to reduce is to just a soft hum, mostly because I felt like the lyrics were most likely in bad taste when paired with the Clive sample, which I want to avoid being. There is a fine line between exploitation and tribute/dedication, and I want to be careful that I’m not accidentally being insensitive or doing anything that could be misconstrued as cruel. Ethics are a difficult thing to navigate if you want to include real world samples, especially real world injustices or cruelty, and I find a lot of media (particularly Documentary or News media (I don’t find this to be a very controversial opinion)) because of the monetary insentive and disgraceful need to make a spectacle of these topics. I feel like that is a digression though, even though the sample is buried I think it gets across the feeling that I want to get across when it pokes through, I really like the title Deborah used for her book about him, Forever Today. Anyway I find his story beautiful and I have been having mental warfare trying to gauge if the incusion is disrespectful in any way and have asked a few friends and have been told to stop worrying, so I hope it comes across well enough, I feel the need to be careful with these things.
I booked out the composition studio as a means of finally getting to spatialise my track, the setup is 7.1, which means 7 speakers surround and 1 sub, so I can approximate what can be used for the 8 speaker circle this way using Logic’s surround panner. I went through the ideas I have had when making the sounds as well as finding new ways to organise things in practice, Logic is very well suited for this I feel, and I am already comfortable with the interface after using it in 6th Form Music Production classes, so it was not much of a learning curve after setting up the speakers and the surround panner mode, can easily send different channels to different channels and automate them. I found that I didn’t really want much movement between speakers with the sounds, I like the seperation where welcome. A main change I made was with the vocoded morph channel, I used the GRM SpaceGrain which was mentioned by Gareth prior, so automate the track into gradually becoming far noisier while being thrown around all speakers in all directions toward the end, which is quite a nice climax I think. I exported each note of the Henry Flynt sample seperately in FL Studio as well so I could hard pan each, so that they create a kind of swarm around the listener, as well as adding a fade in for each note to make up for the lack of an envelope on the Fruity Granulizer.
A stereo version (before putting it into Logic, which when I bounce to stereo now misses out a lot of sounds (and the new use of the Kath Bloom sample so it’s kind of a mess…)
I’m very happy with this piece at the moment, I think it gets across a lot of ideas I care about, an equal balance of ecstatic love and melancholy with a mix of tape warmth flutters, hums and shimmers, so I guess aesthetically it hits every single mark that I am trying to achieve with my music at the moment whilst being within a new medium. I also got to include a piece of a documentary that has not left my mind since I’ve seen it a few years ago, so I guess I get to excercise the fear a little and maybe share that experience with others.