This week was the crit, I hadn’t realised it until I got to the classroom so I was very unprepared sadly, but it wouldn’t have made much difference anyway because the setup that was being used for the speaker system was using only a USB-C, which my laptop doesnt support, so after unsuccesfully trying to find a workaround I had to play it out of my laptop speaker, which didn’t really get across much of anything. The level of critique I got was that Patrick liked the tonality, which I appreciated because I couldn’t really get much to play properly so anything at all was nice. Anyway, something I noticed with other people’s works that I think might have been lacking with my own is a sense of concept, creating something based on personal research and being able to articulate that meaning in a concise manner. I particularly was fond of Mouse’s field recording of where they know that they will be buried, and presenting the recordings without any kind of manipulation as a way of honouring the land, makes me think about field recording practices more, being at peace with ideas of dying, notions of purity, ect, it conveys so much because of the context that the land carries with it…
I don’t think my piece is devoid of meaning, I like to think that everything I make is maybe overly personal, it is all personal aesthetics after all, this one in particular is a kind of ecstatic desperate melancholy I’m still working out how to articulate into something outside of just the sound, it makes sense to me but I just need to get it onto a page so it makes sense to other people.
Anyway, this week I decided I would simplify the piece to being 4 speakers, as I doubt I will ever have the opportunity to use the octo-ring for long enough with how things are going right now, and a lot of the rooms on campus have quad speaker setups anyway. I tried it in the main Mac room though and couldn’t get the quad working whatsoever, so I guess next week I will have to try again. I did make more changes to the track though in that session, as well as got some feedback from Milano in the first year that I should try to make more of a balance with the wetness levels, and there becomes a point where the sounds become indestinct and chaotic, but I’m not sure if this is a fault of it being stereo while being made with more speakers in mind. Worth keeping in mind though I would think.
I also noticed for myself that the chord change genuinely sounds really bad and jarring, so I made the decision of reducing its presence, stretching the first two notes only and looping that so it still adds to a development of the track but it less horribly jarring. I also tried to make the ending a bit more coherent, the Morphed violin tracks now get desynced towards the end as the vocoded one gets overly distorted, the other one gets low passed. The main violin starts to strip itself down and the piano leaves way for the resonator tracks, it is a sudden stop but I wouldn’t want it any other way, feels the best this way I think, not over dramatic and phony, just a soft dying out. I also trimmed it to exactly 5 minutes as per the brief, as I have been marked down for overindulging before. I am quite happy with it in this state to he honest, but I still think a spoken sample would greatly benefit the track, other than that I just need to spatialise it (without overdoing it really) and do the writeup for next week, quite happy.