Pete Sperring’s Online Presence

I thought now would be a good time to discuss the session on Friday in which we all played our final pieces for the live diffusion, and I have to say, I really enjoyed some of the pieces you guys had composed.

I don’t know how much everyone practiced with the set-up in the recital hall, but I spent approximately 3 hours of time rehearsing my piece. 4 hours if you include the hour it took me to figure out the mixer on the first visit!  I suppose I practiced that much because I wanted the diffusion on the day to really bring my composition to life.  Also, because a lot of my sounds were watery/wave sounds, I wanted to know how exactly to pan the sounds around the room to give that feeling of movement as if the sound is washing over you.  I felt practice (as always) would make perfect.

Initially, I was playing through the piece multiple times and improvising movements based on my diffusion strategy diagrams.  I made notes of the movements that worked well with the various sections of the composition.  The notes were vaguely reminiscent of my diffusion strategy diagrams, however took note of the fader positions rather than the audio location in the room as the strategies had done.  After many playthroughs I had built up a set of instructions for most of the parts of the piece, and this became the score I followed on the Friday.  Here is a photo of the score I used on the day:

Diffusion Score

Results:
I definitely felt that having a score made my diffusion more accurate on the day, although I was suprisingly nervous at the time which led to a few errors on my part.  One key error, which occured at 3 minutes 10 seconds, I felt sucked the power out of the last minute of my piece.  It came about by me missing the cue for the particular gesture in the heat of the moment, and was especially annoying because it was the gesture I had spent the most time rehearsing!  Overall though, I felt my diffusion went pretty well, and followed my score almost perfectly.  I was quite pleased with my composition all in all, and having a score was definitely a good thing given the constantly changing dynamics of my piece.  Theoretically, it also means I could repeat the performance on another occasion.

After last weeks diffusion session, I came away filled with ideas for my final diffusion composition.  I really enjoyed all of the things people have with doing with the elastic audio features of Pro Tools (something I could spot quite easily as a Pro Tools user).  Some really nice sounds being made and recorded by the class as well.

I feel the diffusion of my piece went pretty well.  As I discussed in an earlier post I had tried to mimic the dynamic style of Theme de la Fuite with the composition I made using the sound I recorded of a flushing toilet. I my initial composition worked quite well in this respect, but in the one minute time frame, I didn’t have the time to build tension in certain sections.  In my final four minute piece however, which I have been working on this week, this is something I have remedied.  Long build ups which climax in manic jittery moments.

I have stuck with the ‘watery’ theme of the toilet sounds, but have juxtaposed them with some very electronic glitch sounds (which I made by ‘sonifying’ computer program files using Audacity).  I like the idea that water and electricity can exist side by side in a compostion, and even compliment each other, when in reality, they can not.  The sonic properties of electricity seem to mix rather well with some of the water sounds I have so it should be interesting to see whether the listener can tell the difference.

One last thought… the classic acousmatic effect that seems to pop up in many acousmatic pieces (I’m thinking of Jonty Harrison’s Unsound Objects specifically)… turns out it’s just Flange!

A few weeks ago I got a chance to diffuse a few sounds that I had recorded and see whether or not they would work in a diffusion context.  One of the sounds I brought in was a that of a toilet being flushed, and this is the particular sound that I have decided to use for my one minute piece. 

Using the lessons I learnt from diffusing Theme de la Fuite a week or so ago, I have composed the one minute piece in a manner I would deem similar, that is to say with bursts of short sounds followed by longer sounds that bleed in and out of the piece.  Here is what it looks like in the arrange window of Pro-Tools… 

TOILET FLUSH

The piece reminds me in sonically of Jonty Harrison’s Unsound Objects mainly because the toilet flush is comprised mostly of draining water (you may recall that in week 3 we listened to two of Harrison’s pieces, the other was EQ).  The beginning of Unsound Objects is built up mainly of sounds that sound like water draining from an unknown container. 

I’ve tried to structure the piece dynamically into three/four main sections, each of which lends itself to being diffused in a slightly different way.  The piece overall is bounced in mono, so there is no stereo automation, meaning I will have total control over the sounds being heard in each speaker channel.  Hopefully, it will sound ok on the day.

Hey there.  Whilst I’ve been working on the one minute piece for this weeks lesson, I’ve been thinking of different ways to diffuse it, naturally.  However, as the piece is being composed FOR diffusion, I also thought it would be a good idea to work on a way of notating the diffusion, so that it might be played the same way again in the future rather than ‘ad libbed’ during a performance.

I plan on scoring the diffusion to my final piece before playing it, so I decided to work on a simple notation system that would be useful for such a purpose.  As we are using a four channel set up, I decided to use a square design that could be easily read and understood by a ‘diffuser’ during a concert.  Imagine you are in the middle of the square and the four corners are the four channels.

Here are all the possible variations if you want to diffuse from a SINGLE CHANNEL to any other given channel(s).

ONE CHANNEL DIFFUSION OPTIONS

I thought I’d post this up because some of you may wish to develop your own notation for a score come the end of this module.  I’m working on the more complex multi-channel diffusion combinations also, and I’ll post those up when they’re done.

Laters.x