Filed under: Acousmatic Composition
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.
