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This is a youtube link to my submission for ASSIGNMENT 3. If you scroll down, similarly to the first one you’ll find my project report, just below that is a post that will tell you where the cutoff is before it goes to the posts I made for assignment 1. In between those there are various images of the project.  490503865 Aleksander Mitsios

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Some detuning (top) and volume (lower) automation. Volume automation is of the first movement. I Phased the morse code like that because the sample was taken from a spot where it sounded sudden and made that weird popping/clicking noise. I eventually figured out that if you position the start/end of the sample just in between a trough and peak of the waveform, it can reduce that sound significantly, but I still liked the phasing as it made it sound like it was being blown through a bottle, adding to the hopelessness. The detuning for some reason is really hard to show in a screenshot because it doesn’t scale, but you can kind of get the idea of how I was using this function in the final movement.

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The reverb effect on the kick sample

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Early notes and structure draft which helped with planning the piece at the start. Brainstorming is always a difficult part but the lecture that talked about breaking down the creative process into repeatable steps really helped me with this one, and it was probably one of the most valuable lectures this semester.

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The whole project in 2 screens

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Project Report (for Ass. 3)

With this project, I went through many phases of what I wanted to do initially. After some thought, I decided I wanted the primary focus of this assignment to be to draw from the techniques I had been learning this semester, so I put less of a focus on harmony/melody and finding samples, by using the same cataplexy samples from the first assignment to create something new. I was not super happy personally with the composition so I decided I wanted to just make a new 3 movement composition. I’m not sure why but early on I thought of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and I decided to base my 3 movements on the ideas of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. One thing I liked about this idea was that purgatory works well as a transitionary movement between the other 2, so I stuck with it. It also created clear imagery but it was broad enough to allow room for experimentation, which was useful as themes to draw on for the sound I wanted to imitate.

 During this brainstorming phase, the first thing I wanted to do was reverse the movements so that the transition was from heaven to hell. I decided also that I didn’t want to do heaven with the traditional imagery associated with it, and I thought it would be more interesting to represent heaven very abstractly and chaotically, with the idea that this god would be kind of beyond comprehension and scary almost. One thing I was really passionate about was making an icy sounding piece for hell, which not only gave it a different sound than the normal sounds you would associate with hell, but it also took more inspiration from the Divine Comedy, as when Dante reaches the area with Satan and the worst sinners, they’re all frozen in ice. I also was interested in music that portrays icy or cold areas/sounds, so I had a clear image in my head for the sounds I would use. For this reason, I went back on my decision to reverse the movements, as I had an easier time deciding how I would do Hell.

 For a few days I would just listen to and play around with the sounds in cataplexy again, to see how I could manipulate the sounds. I found that the haunting mid melody would sound perfect as an icy drone. An idea I had early on while I was still shaping the piece while trying to convey the hopelessness was to have a subtle S.O.S. message in morse code, as if someone was trying to transmit it on a dinky radio and getting no response. So this actually plays in the first movement, the morse code for S.O.S., which is 3 short notes followed by 3 long notes followed by another 3 short notes. I think that morse code can be a really interesting way to get hidden messages across in music, if I were using this idea again in another context, I might incorporate the code into the rhythm of a major reoccurring melody. The fireworks worked really well for this icy cave ambience I was making, and using the cabasa sample I made this weird breathing noise that sounds like it could be someone walking through deep snow, and I thought it worked really well as a percussion instrument because it had a very uncanny sound, so it kept a semblance of pulse while not taking too much away from the ambient intent. I used the bells to make some creepy background melodies. I was experimenting later with the hat and made this kinda groovy sounding beat with the bells, and I slowly built it up while trying to keep it very low key (as in not overbearing, subtle, not in a lower key). I like that it breaks up the pace of this movement while keeping the icy feel established with the bells. This probably represents the idea of climbing out of hell, it sounds to me like a persistent feeling, so I imagine it as trying to escape hell with conviction. It also helped to transition a bit less suddenly into my idea for the purgatory section.

 For this section I came up with the idea while I was composing rather than before. I decided if purgatory was about working on yourself to prepare yourself for heaven, it could be interesting to have a percussion buildup, kinda like slowly building a house. It also gave me an excuse to use the kick. I felt the percussion was a bit limiting, but one experiment I did that turned out well I think was that I pitched the kick an octave down, and alternated between the normal strong kick and this slightly slower but weaker kick, and I think it sounds interesting as like a strong-weak hit beat. I liked that I was able to get this variety from just the kick. I started adding different percussion, and eventually a bassline. To keep it simple and focus more on specifically sound manipulation, I had the bass just play through the cycle of of 5ths, which made me think of transitioning which is probably the strongest basic theme of this movement. Slowly I add more notes to the bassline, and I begin to fade in this whooshing wind sound, which I thought was perfect for the idea of being near to heaven, like high up on the mountain of purgatory. The distance between the 2 voices in the bassline increases a bit from a major third to a 4th, and I thought it sounded interesting, I considered going a semitone more but I thought it going to a tritone (aka devil’s interval) was a bit unsubtle, and not really what I was going for.

 Unfortunately the heaven section is one I struggled with the most, and it was the most difficult for me. It’s probably the section I’d like to redo the most, but I found it difficult to create the image in my head with the samples I had. I wanted to have primal drums, and human vocalisations, and a high pitched twinkling sound, and only the twinkling sound was really effective of those 3. For the drums, I added reverb to the kick, and it works ok but gets drowned out. The only real vocalisations I wanted to use were in the grainy sound, and it was difficult to get a good sample with them. I went back to more random notes for a chaotic effect, and I reused the bells for the twinkling sound, which I think works well. This part feels the most empty but I found it difficult because anything I added I would not like and remove. If I were to redo this I would have much more stuff in it. One thing I experimented with was detuning in this, and I think that works nicely by adding more microtones to the piece. I used draw mode so I was able to easily make chaotic changes in pitch. I’m not sure how I feel about the bassy grainy sound I used at the end, but I really like the slowed down effect for creepy sounds.

 Overall I think this project went better than my first one, there are still things I would do differently now but I like how the first 2 movements turned out and it allowed me to experiment more on the samples and manipulating the sound through effects, filters, etc. There was also very clear imagery to work with, and having the samples already there helped a lot.

Aleksander Mitsios

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BELOW THIS POST ARE CURRENTLY IRRELEVANT POSTS FOR THE FIRST ASSIGNMENT

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This is a youtube link to the audio of the composition. A detailed post about my process is at the bottom of this blog. The rest are pictures/screenshots of my working/project file with short descriptions for context. Aleksander Mitsios 490503865

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Screenshots of the final project, as well as my working/notes for this version of the project

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Very old ideas before I had a strong creative vision for the project. I had written  down a small  diagram of the struture as well as some melodies and random ideas I had

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Ideas for my horror themed project that got scrapped plus screenshots of stuff I wrote for the project in Ableton and musescore

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My Project Plan

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Some drum beats I wrote down

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Project Report

When I started this project, I was unsure what to do, but I really liked the intro of Cataplexy and how it grows in complexity by adding instruments, as I had heard this idea done before in one of my favourite pieces of music, so I knew I wanted to have that in. My first thoughts were to the structure since that was the focus of the project, and once I understood the structure map, I thought of what I wanted to do for my piece. I thought it could be interesting to have an A, B and C section instead of a second A section or A’ section, and structure it more like a 3 movement classical work with very distinct sections. I was playing off the idea that the 1st and 3rd major sections would be more upbeat whereas the middle section would be slower and more experimental, kind of like the first movement in sonata form theory but more modern. I had this idea up until the final draft of my work where I decided to scrap it and just do 2 A sections due to time constraints. In the final work, the second A section is similar to cataplexy in which the main motif is combined by multiple instruments at once and is more separated/spread out in the first A section. Similarly, the B sections in both have the main percussion faded out. I went through a lot of ideas in terms of the tone of the piece. One of my early ideas was to have a forest theme, focusing on mushrooms, but I didn’t get very far with that. My most fleshed out idea other than my final one was to have the piece be themed after a haunted rollercoaster ride. This used my ABC structure. The piece was structured like a story, where the A section was meant to be the protagonist going through a horror themed ride at some theme park, and a lot of cheesy horror cliches would have been used, like cartoon spooky sound effects, and marimbas to sound like skeletons playing music from their ribcages, using a lot of tropes and cliches. The transition to the B section would have been very sudden, and the idea was meant to be that the ride malfunctioned in some way. Either the vehicle crashed through the floor, or the power went out in the middle of the ride. The protagonist would then have to make their way out of the ride somehow. This section would have used a lot of non-musical sound effects, such as footsteps, breathing, and more realistic sounds. At some point this person encounters an actual monster and has to run away to escape, which would trigger the C section. The C section would be in the same key as the A section, but have slightly different melodies due to being faster and maybe in a different time signature. I also would have replaced all of the instruments with synthesisers. Then the outro would reflect the intro in some way to sound like he is leaving the ride. I ended up scrapping this idea for the project, I wrote some melody ideas for it but I felt more and more uninspired when I had a lot of trouble finding the right instruments for the project, which has been my main weakness when starting any project in a DAW. Due to time constraints I decided I would have to continue making a project without caring about the instruments and I decided to approach it more analytically to complete the project rather than creatively. My final idea was a lot more experimental, and honestly it evolved as I found samples and picked instruments. My basic process for this project was:

1. Research phase: Experiment with reverb and EQ to feel very comfortable with it, and find samples to use in the project including within the cataplexy stems 2. Writing phase: Program the music 3. Mixing phase: add the finishing touches

I ended up doing the second and third phases mostly simultaneously, as it helped a lot to do processes like automation while I was composing so that I could get a better idea of how the instruments would finally sound. I experimented a lot with panning and audio effects in this project, which in previous personal projects I hadn’t really done. As I have said previously, my final version of this project used an A’ section instead of a C section, which was simply because with this version of the project I didn’t have a creative reason to differ other than thinking it would be cool, and also due to time constraints it helped to reuse musical material.

 I ended up sourcing a lot of sounds from a royalty free sound website called mixkit, and I looked for a lot of ambient/metallic sounds to get the texture I was looking for. One sound which was originally a hammer striking an anvil, I edited to sound like muffled footsteps. This project was a very interesting learning experience, and I was humbled in many ways. I found out that many aspects were more difficult than I gave credit for, such as finding the right instruments. However I also found out that many aspects were much simpler to understand than I initially thought, such as applying reverb and EQ. I tried to apply what I learned about Layer Cake Orchestration in the piece, and I think most parts sound distinct, though I found it difficult to decide how to effectively use panning to my advantage. Aleksander Mitsios 490503865