Electroacoustic Experiments

Reaper Is Not Free!

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Rules

No plugins, No effects, No stretching
Only slicing and copy-pasting

Description

Reaper Is Not Free was our first project. We tried imitating the ancient tape musics. One of the examples was Steve Reich’s.

We learned something called Acousmatic Music. It is hard to explain, but if I were to try, I would say it is a type of music which you uses recordings of sounds which are disembodied from their source. By doing so, they completely destroy the musical traditions and the perspective of music = melody, accompaniment, conventional structures... I know it is confusing. Disembodiment means you hear the sound not as a reflection of the source, but as an individual being. Think of seeing the colour blue while looking at the sky; However, you do not think about the sky, only focus on the colour. On this, you do not hear the words from the sentence, only the complex pitch contents of the frequencies...

The strange aspect of acousmatic music is that, even though you may reject its existence and find it unappealing, you begin to appreciate and understand it more if you are a member of the music-creating community. Its philosophy is very fundamental and persistent in all forms of music production. Even if you do not like it, starting to listen and trying to understand helps you develop a critical ear for sound, which can be applied to all kinds of sound, ideas, and musical color design.

So, thanks to my friend in my school, Berna, I have recorded a very close text to my heart; Reaper is not Free! The disclaimer of Reaper that says it is not free and I have to purchase the software. Reaper is goat btw, they have the same policy with WINRAR, which both have infinite trial period with no limitation. I tried to create something interesting with the plain text and literally no effect.

Attack Of BENQ

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Rules

Recordings must come from one chosen object and one additional material type (BENQ camera and glass).
Only built-in Reaper reverb and delay effects are allowed.

Description

"Attack on BENQ" is my second project for this course. We were tasked with selecting an object, which could be a toy, tool, music box, etc., and we were asked to use only recordings of that item, along with one additional material type. I chose my trusty 10-year-old BENQ camera and glass. So I started recording every possible way of getting a sound from those 2 elements.

In addition to that, I wanted to create a storyline. Fun fact: its storyline is the same as that of one of my older compositions, Beast. This piece tells a story of an alien invasion of an alternative, glassy universe. Let your imagination do the job! (Spoilers: Glass people nuke the BENQ)

So, the technical side of things was that I tried to create a living monster with the camera button, focusing, and flashing sounds. Not only that, I tried to create a world full of birds, animals, rivers, and people with just the glass noises. To do that, you need to think of trees as sharp spikes, dirt as white glass dust, and air as sparkling water. The first image I can think of is a cactus-green world with semi-transparent colours, which is the fact that I recorded soda bottles' sounds to create that change my perception...

On the technical standpoint, I learned that I could use Reaper's integrated LFO and sidechain tools in WHATEVER I WANT from this piece, alongside parallel audio processing. We were only allowed to use built-in Reaper reverb and delay, so I tried my best to create this vision in a limited time I got :D

Matchbox

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Rules

Sounds must be derived from a single element (fire from a match).
Allowed effects include built-in frequency plugins like ring modulators, ladders, EQs, and delays.
The piece should be color/sound-driven, not story-driven.

Description

Matchbox is my 3rd project, and to be honest, I did not document so many things about it. Also, I do not remember much about it, but I believe I worked on morphism, imitating other sound sources with unrelated sound sources. We were allowed to pick an element, and record dynamic sounds (if air, blowing air, wind, etc, if water, splash sounds, etc). I thought: "What is the hardest sound I can record?". The answer was fire. I didn't know fire had a sound until that point, I thought its sounds were made out of burning and crackling wood, paper, etc. But yes, it has a distinct plasma sound.

Because at this time, I was also writing 3 pieces, and 2 of them had a deadline in the same week, I could not record exotic sounds. Not only that, I just had 1 match burning sound, but I had the courage. This whole piece is based on those 2-3 seconds of fire. We were allowed to use built-in frequency plugins such as ring modulators, ladders, EQs, delays, etc. So, I created the matchbox. This piece is not story-driven. Instead, it is a colour/sound-driven piece, purely designed for an interesting sound experience.

99 Cent Diptychon II

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About

This piece is purely based on Andreas Gursky's 99-Cent-II-Diptychon conceptual photography. Gursky's common design principle leans on constructing hyperspaces with bunch of different photos he takes during his travels. One of his most important qualities and signatures is destroying the perspective, thus he creates hyper-complex and big pictures that shower the audience with gigantic amounts of visual information. One of his techniques includes making the horizon line straight and removing the vanishing point. After creating the base image, he edits colours, adds new elements and light games. He also pays attention to social-political subjects such as consumerism, wild capitalism, degrading nature and such.

This piece of music is no different from the picture; I essentially took all of Gursky's ideas and processed them with noise in a serialist manner. First, one of my main goals was to capture this scene with enormous amounts of visual information. To do that, I wanted to associate every colour with something and create the same layer effect. I wanted to preserve the underlying consumerism theme, so I used various music I recorded from my global internet radio, speaker and tablet. I opened different kinds of media, such as FM radio, internet radio, and in some cases, streaming services. This enabled me to create such a massive information load while recreating the "supermarket" idea with the popular music industry.

Then, I calculated the layers of shelves, and most importantly, the approximate distance-to-frequency ratio. This means if "shelf 0" is 3 box wide (total width: 11), this will translate to a ~%36 per cent, to compare the logarithmic size of the FabFilter Q3, this is approximately 0-96Hz range.

However, I am not perfect. I couldn't finish the whole piece, putting a different file for every colour is a task that's bigger than I can chew. So I finished the first half in 2 minutes and mirrored it! He is the new picture:

Color Legend

Blue	Blues/Jazz
Purple	EDM
Red	Rock/Metal
Orange	Hip-Hop
Green	Classical Music
White	White noise
Black	Silence