Electroacoustic Compositions
Throughout my studies at the University of Illinois, I found that electroacoustic makes you focus on the timbre of the piece and how that evolves rather than melodic or harmonic development. Throughout my compositions, I find that telling a story is extremely helpful. Composition in this medium is extremely free, as you are not restricted to any form, instruments, harmony, or sounds.
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For this composition, I focused on using my voice as a way to change around the timbre of the piece. I also used soundgrain to create a texture that sounded like monsters and fill the lower field of the timbre. The sound of wind also does this, and brings a large lower presence to the beginning of the piece. I wanted to also give some space in betwen the two sections. Ligeti was a large inspiration by using his micropolyphony. One of the hard parts of this piece was that after I recorded my voice parts, it was really hard to organize which ones were sticking out. I started organizing by pitch, but it was not as useful, and instead I listened and solo'd tracks to balance out the levels. I tried using a compressor for this, but it did not work as well since balancing all the parts required EQ as well. The processing of the screaming was one of my favorite parts because I used Ableton's Erosion and Saturation to slowly degrade the sound of my voice screams, giving the piece a more agitated feel. Overall I had a lot of fun conceptually with soundmass. It allowed me to express a feeling rather than a specific melody.
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The root of this composition came from my grandmother’s struggle with dementia and eventual passing recently. It was very hard to see a person slowly forget who you are and eventually turn into a shell of a being that needed help at each moment. Something I really appreciate about electronic composition over acoustic instruments is the ability to unnerve and make the listener feel uncomfortable, so I wanted to share this sense of dread within my piece. I first asked my father for songs that my grandmother would have listened to during her prime, and I eventually selected 永远的微笑 - 周璇 (Forever Smile by Zhou Xuan), a popular song within the Mandarin Oldies collection of the 40’s/50’s. I wanted the listener to first enjoy the piece in its original form before having it be slowly destroyed and dismantled akin to the loss of memory for a person with dementia.
Within my composition, I rely heavily on the use of reverb and delay to transition my piece from a recognizable tune to a collection of sound. The large amount of feedback within my delay helps to disassociate the melody from the piece and separate elements of the original song into sound objects. As well, I follow Schaeffer’s technique of locked groove within his Musique Concrete by using a frozen delay where the sample stays the same and slowly builds with other lines doing the same to create a cacophonous sound. I created small glitches within the audio by applying EQ and panning to very small sections of each track. To distort the audio, I used Ableton’s Vinyl Distortion and emphasized the odd harmonics more than the even to make the original sound less recognizable. Towards the end, I used a granular delay with a large variance in both pitch and density to really tear apart the original audio and create a very uncomfortable sound. The noise towards the end is the original sound put through multiple granular delays and a vocoder where the carrier spectrum is just noise. This allows just enough information through to almost be able to be recognized, but not enough to make any sense of it, similar to how a person would feel if they had lost their core memories. Finally, I have a crackle to add to a low fidelity sound, and transform it from the needle starting a happy song to a bleak finality of this disease.
More coming soon
