7/27/2019 Music Technology Summative Assesment
2/2
shared Music Technology student drive, I decided to use some of
the tracks in my
second piece. The group presentations this term also showed me
just how much
sampling is used in todays music, and both how effective and how
ineffective itcan be. I realised that lot of the music I listen to,
particularly the house and dance
music that I would associate with nights on the town, contain
samples that have
been used to create a remix into a new genre. Its almost hard to
find club music
which hasnt been sampled from other well-known pieces,
particularly 20th
century music. Blame it on the Boogie is one of my favourite
pieces of all time so
I felt like I would take the opportunity to (at least attempt)
to use the vocal
samples and mix it into a track. Ideally my aim was to create
something that I
would be happy to listen to on a regular basis.
The piece is much more up-beat that the last (even though its
meter is actuallyslower) and has a driving drum line throughout.
The main bass as such is using
a sample of the opening down-beat of the piece as a loop and
modifying it in
various ways throughout the track. Twice during the piece the
opening bars of
the original piece are played in acoustic form, as a quasi-
refrain to which I add
the new drum line and then break up the beat and re-loop the
downbeat. For thispiece, I made heavy use of different inserts such
as the tone filter, tonic filter and
a range of delays to create echoes and change in timbre. So many
of the effects I
came across were familiar to me from contemporary electronic
music (and I
suddenly understood where all these kinds of sounds came from)
which is why I
applied some of them to the piece.
Piece 3 NirgendwoThe final piece is once again very distinct to
the previous pieces, being half as
fast, in 3/4 meter and not really having a sense of direction or
purpose. It is a
piece you can get lost in, a reason as to why the piece is
entitled Nirgendwo, theGerman word for nowhere. I imagine this
piece to be like lying in a forest on
your back, after a light summer storm, and having the sun shine
through the
leaves of the trees above. There are sounds of birds and
insects, some closer and
some further and a distant sound of wind chimes. Ive used a
mixture of
synthesised elements, such as the high-pitched ringing glass
sound and the bell
pad, but also orchestral samples such as the strings chords.
Often I feel that
electronic music lacks a certain tranquillity, and I wanted to
bring back a serene
feel to the genre with this piece. Its easy to forget that the
meter is being held by
the three water drops, which somehow get immersed in the
ambience
throughout the piece but return later at the end: the nature is
just how we left itand the piece could essentially start right from
the beginning again and continue
the tranquil peace.
Overall I feel that I have broadened my understanding of music
composition, and
had a taste of how tracks are produced. I have attempted to
apply a range of the
techniques I have acquired over the term so far including all
the tools required in
mastering the track to make the finished product. There are a
number of ways in
which I think the tracks can improve, although I am very
satisfied with them as
they are now, and I am very much determined to keep working on
music
production using similar software in the future!
