Ani's Composition Blog

Today I really got into the composition project for the recital. I dissecting the piece that I had in my head and putting that down in my DAW. I had a lot of conflicting ideas and so I found a middle ground to go along with where the piece was taking me. Sticking to what I had decided initially was a little hard, and I accepted the changes as they came along. I feel like not going by a set plan and kind of going in the general directional flow that the piece wants to go in is the best way to approach a project like this. I found some of the sounds that I had recorded extremely useful. I altered some sounds I gathered from nature into sounding like some orchestral instrument, or pretty close to one. I found a few new plugins that I am very excited to try, especially the new vocoders I got my hands on. I was also able to fix my windows/mac issues with my laptop and DAW and my DAW is finally up and working for good. With the composition recital inching closer, I am constantly taking i...

This piece tricked me into being very excited to listen to it. The piece was called "Requiem" with numbers called "Sanctus", "Lux Aeterna". However, being a composer, I quickly got into the rhythm of Chion's version of Requiem. The first thought that came to my mind when listening to this piece was void memes. The sounds used in this album bear a striking resemblance to the various textures and colours of the Avangard void memes.  The metallic sounds, with alterations that make them sound almost overly industrial, overshadow the original source of the sound. I tried reverse engineering a few sounds, but they were so complexly processed that it was almost impossible to get to the root of the sound. Also, I tried comparing the piece Lux Aeterna by the choir version of Mansell's Lux Aeterna performed by Voces8. I tried to find if Chion borrowed any inspiration from these pieces. However, I was not able to draw any parallels.  However, I see whe...

For my composition, I began looking at other types of audio illusions. While looking into the world of audio illusions, I thought of the sound that divided the world into two halves in 2018. Do you hear Yanny or Laurel? Turns out, younger ears that can hear higher pitches hear Yanny, while ears that can not hear higher frequencies hear Laurel. The two words had a very similar shape on a band EQ, and when layered on top of each other fit together perfectly. I tried replicating the sounds, only to realise how much work must have been put into it to make it sound like just one sound. I changed a lot of my ideas about how I want my composition to be. I want to make it rhythmic and full of anticipation that keeps the listener on the edge of their seats. In order to do that, Shepard Tones are definitely going to help me. However, I am also going to include sounds that have a connotation of hurriedness, for example, clock ticks, pencil scribbling on a paper etc. Over the week, I was facin...

Dhomont’s  Foret Profonde is a very intriguing album that has a perpetual sense of change and fast-paced motion. The sounds in this piece seem to be very fluttery, and bouncy. Often seems like there are gates or delay put on specific sounds that when triggered create that rushed feeling.  This album plays around with human and natural sounds and alters them in a way that makes the two very interactable. It feels like the purpose of this album was to agree upon a middle ground for both humans and nature for co-existence. It's almost as if he alters the sounds, which are apparent to the listener, but he wants the listeners to think that he didn't alter them, but processed them instead.  Track number 3: Chambre interdite is a very good example of that. It begins with a rumbling, which appears to be gated and thus sounds very fluttery. After that, the animal-like gasps are altered in a way that sounds otherworldly. The combination of gating the sound and altering wit...

As the composition recital week inches closer, I have started spending a lot of time trying to plan out my composition in my head. Over the years I have been composing music, I feel like I have a decent idea of how my creativity works when it comes to making music. I plan out about 60% of the song in my head, and then dissect each individual parts and try to replicate those in my DAW. The rest of the 40% (or maybe more/less) comes from playing around in the DAW, experimenting, feedback from people etc. What I was really intrigued by was the idea of audio illusions. Sounds that seem to be doing something, but actually aren't, just "seem" to. So for the score, I thought of looking up optical illusions that would be the closest representation of what I had in mind. After about an hour of looking through several mind-bending illusions, I finalised three of those. Each figure represented a different movement in the piece. The quality and the shape, number of sides etc. also ...

This piece was a very unique and well-structured piece to listen to. Most of the numbers on the album start abruptly with a loud sound which sets in the entire scenery of the piece. Like, the second piece, for example, is in this very typical rural setting. Once you hear the train come in, the listener is put in a different position than in the first piece. In the second piece, the listener is not inside the train, but outside. Whereas the first piece creates an image that the listener is in the train itself. Also, I was trying to draw parallels of the names of the numbers with how they sounded. Particularly, track number 6, where there is no audible sound of Chihuahua. However, noticing the quality of sounds, I can draw some similarities. The sounds are small in terms of dynamics but intense in terms of the colour. The piece also makes clever use of stereo-imaging which helps set up a virtual world for the listeners and they get a visual (even though just by auditory senses) idea ...