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

Hello there.  I just thought I’d share a few thoughts on my experience diffusing Dhomont’s Theme de la Fuite on Friday of last.

I particularly like the piece, an expansion of his earlier work Points de fuite (vanishing points), because of its changing dynamics and its overall sci-fi feel.  When I listened to the piece for the first time, I could envisage straight away how I would attempt to diffuse it across four channels.  The earlier section of the composition is filled with ‘manic’ moments where many sounds are thrown together rapidly over a few seconds followed by a long sweeping sound.  I could imagine ‘throwing’ the sounds between the four channels rapidly during the manic moments with a slow pan during the sweeping the sound.  In this way the diffusion would heighten the feeling of chaos by keeping the audience ‘on their toes’ not knowing where the sound is going to appear from next.  The sweeping sound would then ‘calm them down’ by allowing them to predict the movement of the sound through the room.

I feel that diffusing Dhomont’s Theme de la fuite was a fairly intuitive process in the long run.  Listening to the piece a few times I felt as if it was telling me how to diffuse it.  When it came to the ‘performance’ on Friday I thus had a rough diffusion strategy in my head for each of the sections and applied them to the piece ‘on the fly’.  Overall I think I did a pretty good job of achieving the strategies I had worked out, and I hope the audience enjoyed the live mix as much as I enjoyed mixing.

I particularly like the manic moments with calm aftermath at the beginning of the piece, not just for their compositional dynamics but also for their diffusion potential.  I hope ultimately to emulate those dynamics in my final piece.

After playing with live diffusion for the last two weeks, I have a few impressions that may be of interest to some people regarding the types of sounds that work and those that don’t.  Read on…

I believe that for a live mix it would probably be beneficial to the composer to have a more ‘spacious compostion’ (individual sounds that rarely cross each other, as opposed to lots of sounds fading in and out across the stereo field) in order to retain maximum control of the piece.  In a 5.1 automated mix however, the composer has complete control in advance of the performance and so has the opportunity to make the mix much more ‘manic’.

From the examples we have seen in class, I think the shorter sounds tend to lend themselves better to a manual mix with the four channel set-up without sounding sloppy.  I think a much more dynamic piece could be performed using shorter sounds without automated control.

In order to perform a circular pan, however, it seems to me that a longer sound with persistent dynamic properties may have an advantage over such shorter sounds, or longer sounds with their own dynamics (think of my bean bag recording vs. the flushed toilet recording which I demonstrated today).  The toilet sound panned much more smoothly than the bean bag.  

I think a smoother longer sound can move around between the four channels more easily than the shorter sounds which would appear to jump between the speakers.  Not to say that wouldn’t work in a composition however, as a short sound jumping between locations is just as interesting as a long sound doing the same, it just achieves a different effect.

Overall, I think it is important to have a mix of long and short sounds in the final composition, but in order to have maximum control over the positions in the mix, it will be important to structure the piece in movements so that any panning that occurs can be done to maximum effect.

x.