Music Composition

I worked on a music composition a couple of quarters ago.  Our parameters for this involved using no musical sounds whatsoever.  This is known typically as Musique Concrete.  It requires a lot of attention to detail and a lot of fine tuning of many sounds to get each sound to function properly within the tune.  I started out by recording a handful of random knickknacks from my garage and bedroom. I used things such as glass bottles, metal water containers, jars of screws and nails, a butane torch, and even the sound of water running.  On top of that we were allowed to synthesize sounds together using an old fashioned Analog Synthesizer, which works on making physical patches to get specific sounds.  I recorded about an hour of different patchwork with that, and that provided me with many of my layers which I used to provide rhythm to the piece.  The fun of music concrete is really manipulating the samples to change their sounds into something completely different than what they originally were.   Using time expansion and compression I took many different sounds and sped them up, and others I slowed down to add more ambience to the piece.  Lining the samples up with each other amongst the whole piece was very time consuming, and it took a lot of creativity to really get some magic to happen.  We weren’t allowed to use any real plug-ins for this project either besides basic EQ and compression.  This added another layer of difficulty in making these sounds stand out without adding any high level effects such as flanging or chorus effects.  Arranging a three and a half minute piece sample by sample is definitely tedious, but the ultimate outcome of the piece was exceptional.