Lo-fi Oberlin
For my Music and Ecology Final, I
chose to compose a piece using only sounds recorded around Oberlin in an
attempt to increase people’s aural awareness and to blur the lines between
“sounds” and “music”. With the right mindset, anything can be music.
Process
I recorded all the sounds on my
phone and then imported them into FL Studio. I began by creating the drums and
percussion of the song. The “snare drum” is actually a rock being tossed at a
plank of wood. I pitched it down a bit and then EQd it to get a nice snare
sound. The kick is actually two “kicks” layered on top of each other. The first
is simply me hitting a bench in the arb with my palm. It gave a pretty kicky
sound, so I didn’t have to manipulate it much. I did trim it to a bit to remove
some of the ringing from the bench. The second kick is a rock being thrown at
the same bench. This gave a sound that was higher pitched than I wanted, but
after some trimming, pitching down, and EQing, I managed to get the desired
sound. Both put together make a pretty good kick drum. Next, I made a quick
hi-hat pattern. Again, there are actually two sounds that make up the hi-hats.
This gives the pattern some dynamics and an accented feel. The two hi-hats were
made by clicking the rocks at different places. One is lower pitched than the
other. On top of all that, I threw in some extra foley like rolling a rock on a
bench. Finally, I exported the drum set into a .wav file, put it back into the
project and added some reverb to fill up the space. I also EQed the “drum set”
as a whole one more time to make it fit better in the mix.
After creating the drumbeat, I
moved on to making the bass. At first, I was intimidated because I had never
really done much sampling/sound manipulation. I knew that it would be a lot
tougher than creating a drum loop. The first thing I did was to go through my
recordings and find a nice sound I liked. I ended up using a couple geese
honking overhead. I threw it into a program called Fruity Slicer which slices
the sound so that different parts of it can be played on the keyboard. In the
picture below, playing a C5 on the keyboard would play the first slice, playing
C#5 would play the second slice and so on. After finding a sound I liked (which
was the 3rd slice), I put the sound into Harmor, an additive
synthesizer (it basically creates sounds by layering sine waves). This gave me
some really funky results, but in the end, I got a bass that I actually really
like considering it’s a goose.
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| Figure: Fruity Slicer |
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| Figure: Screengrab of Harmor |
The
image at the bottom of Harmor is actually the graph of the goose honk. From
there I could choose whether I wanted the sound to go through the graph or to
stay at one given spot. It could also choose whether I wanted the sound to loop
or if I wanted a “one-shot”. I split the channel into two to widen the sound
and also applied a low pass to eliminate some really strange sounds from the
geese and other artifacts. This process was a lot of fun. In electronic music
production, a lot of people complain that good sounds are too expensive but if
you know how, it is fairly easy to make a decent bass out of almost anything.
I’m not saying this is the most impressive bass ever created (it sounds very
close to just a simple sine bass), but it was definitely nice to learn a new
skill.
After
the drum and bass came the most dreadful part for me, creating a top-line
melody. In my head I really wanted to create a pad-like or rhodes-like sound.
After several attempts, I couldn’t really get anything that sounded good (the
next thing I need to learn). So, I decided I might go from something that
sounded like a DJ scratching. As I was walking through the Arb, past the
bridge, I stopped and recorded some birds having a conversation. I cut out a
small piece of the beginning of one bird’s song. I wish I could identify it,
but I guess that’s another skill I need to learn after this project. Anyways,
to turn this snippet of bird song into a “scratch”, I simply played a couple
chords and deconstructed a couple chords in D-major. Due to the short nature of
the sound, I ended up with a decent top-line. Again, I added some reverb and
EQ-ed the birds. I also added an effect from the plug-in Gross Beat that does
half-speed. I didn’t want the sound to be completely halved so I only turned
the effect on around 50% which actually gave me a really cool mid bass
underneath the top melody since both the full and half-speed versions of the
sound were playing.
Finally,
to finish off the whole song, I added a couple more sounds to add texture. The
intro the song is a short recording I took as I was making my way towards the
arb on Morgan Street. Then we hear a quick snippet of a card opening a dorm
door. I liked the idea of using that in the intro as a sort of entrance to the
song. Finally, I also added the raw recording of the geese flying overhead.
Overall,
I am pretty satisfied with the song and I’m glad that this project has opened a
whole new avenue for me to explore in the future when it comes to music production.
I had a couple more recordings that I wish I could’ve found a place for in the
song. For instance, I dropped a small pebble into one of the Arb ponds and I
got a really cool splashing sound but there wasn’t really an appropriate place
for it in the song. I also got a recording of snapping a twig. The sound from
the recording was really low for some reason and again, didn’t really sound
right. There were also a couple sounds I would have liked to have been able to
get but couldn’t, the main one being sounds created with the railroad tracks.
They were surrounded by tall grass and mud and I didn’t want to risk getting
ticks.
Connections
to the Class
One of the first
assignments in this class was an ear cleaning experiment. For this, we had to wear
earplugs for at least four hours though it was recommended to do longer if
possible. After the time had elapsed, we were instructed to go out and really
listen to the sounds around us. It is really impressive the amount of sounds
that we ignore or automatically filter out. If you have the time, I highly
recommend trying this, but please be safe while wearing ear plugs. With this
project I wanted to create a similar effect. I wanted to record sounds that are
fairly mundane and create a song with them.
Another
important point of discussion at the beginning of the semester was the
difference between sound and music and who gets to decide what is which. A lot
of the sounds I used wouldn’t traditionally be considered music on their own.
In the whole song, the one sound that is heavily processed is the bass (I found
it really hard to find a natural bass). All the other sounds are fairly
recognizable.
The main
reason I wanted to create this song was that I thought that soundscapes, though
really interesting and insightful seem to be mostly appealing to academics. I
wanted to reach another crowd and created a (hopefully) more accessible song in
order to get them to be more conscious of the sounds and music around them. I
think sound is a great way to measure the health of an environment and I think
that music is a great way to get people to empathize. I hope this song acts as
a gateway to activities like soundwalks, listening to soundscapes and ear
cleaning exercises.
The main
inspiration for this project was Bernie Krause’s album Gorillas in the Mix. The whole album was done using various sampled
animal sounds played on a keyboard. Bernie Krause was the first person to use
natural soundscapes in a recorded album in 1968’s In a Wild Sanctuary. I would
like this song to inspire other people to really listen to the world around
them and hear the musicality of it all.
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