4th Post

Musical Experiments

I have started creating music that will be part of my prototype phone cloud performance. Obviously as these sounds will be played on phone speakers there is no point in using sounds with any bass so i have focused on higher frequencies. I wanted to have a mixture of textural, rhythmic and pad sounds so i made some rhythmic loops using found sound recordings made from going through my recycling. Scrunching plastic bottles, hitting tin cans and popping bubble wrap. I then processed the sounds and made some loops. 

I wanted to have an orchestral string pad to play some constant chords so i played a simple two chord pattern but with descending notes that make it slightly confusing as where the start of the sequence is. I also added a glockenspiel pattern and a synth with some delay. 



Listening back on the computer speakers i felt the sounds were pretty good so bounced it to a MP3 and tried playing it from my phone and computer at the same time. This made me realise that there was too much going on with both devices playing all the sounds. The percussion became very confusing but the strings, glockenspiel and synth sounded good. There was a nice polyrhythmic delay happening with the single notes and the string pad sounded nice. When i muted some of the percussion on the computer it worked better so i will need to think about how to make percussion work. I think it will need to be a lot less dense than the complex glitchy loops i created. I will try making 3 different versions of the music, so the different sounds are spread over different devices. I will also experiment with different parts of the same sound being on different phones so that the sounds seem to jump around from device to device. This might work particularly well with percussion sounds. The basic piece is below and i will test it with multiple devices as soon as possible.