Beach 2

Mix Log

When mixing these three sounds together in order to create a sounds cape representing peacefulness or calmness, I really didn’t have to do much.  There was a natural progression of change between the park sounds, the footsteps and the beach sounds, all I had to do was arrange them in that order and fade them gradually and naturally into each other before finally fading out. During this remix I think that the park sounds capturing a wide range of distant sounds gives a sense of open surroundings with a peaceful breeze on a summers day, thakns to the birds and children present in the recording. The footsteps give the impression of a person by themselves walking through this scenery, just enjoying the ‘silence’ and calm aspects of their surroundings. Finally the water movements is a really great sound, very natural and direct, a sort of personal point of view from the journey so far.


Track 1: ‘Park Nostalgia” (Process Development Exercise #1 – based on an emotion

Recording 1

I walked around the house basically thumping items trying to get a solid deep sound, with a bit of snap, to replicate a kick drum sound. After punching an empty solid guitar case I decided to use this. I took a few recordings of this and chose a really beefy one that sounded satisfying enough for me.


Gtr Case Punch

Recording 2

Clinking two bottles of half empty vodka together that were sitting on the fridge gave a really cliché clink sound you could here in any party/bar scene. I recording several takes of myself doing so and settled on one that had a good sound, with a little rattle of the bottle on the fridge top after the initial clink. I chose this because I figured the more audio I captured, the more I could do with it later.


Vodka bottle

Recording 3

The third audio sample was completely different. When my house mate walked in the door home from work, I stuck the my iPhone in his face and asked him how his life was going, to which he said, “excellent, and that about sums that up”. I figured I could sample, auto tune and go to town on a “vocal” clip and take it completely out of context to make it seem funny.


Glens Vocal Sample

In order to replicate Musique Concrete, I recorded several sounds, (myself hitting a guitar case, the clink of a bottle, and my house mate telling me how his day was) and decided to turn them into a song through production techniques in Pro Tools. 
This remix got so much more complicated than I intended, which really worked in my favour. After i created a basic beat with the thump and bottle clink, I sampled, distorted and effected the thump to give it a gritty snare sound to add to the remix. Using these three samples I created the basic structure of the song, adding in sampled and effected vocal lines throughout. I also pitch corrected the clink sound to give it a glockenspiel sound, and sampled it into a melody. I copied parts of this melody, reversed it and slowed it down on a different track with heavy phaser effect and distortion which gave an awesome sound, something straight out of a transformers movie. I continued to re sample and effect these clips until I had enough different sounding material to mix into the short song. The song itself is very rough, but through using traditionally non musical aspects, I created what could pass as an average pop song, it has catchy melodies, a vocal hook, an acceptable beat, and loosely strophic structure that is found in most pop songs. 


Track 5: ‘Excellent’ (Process Development Exercise #5 – using Musique Concrete techniques)


After listening to several mashups by DeadMou5e and Girl Talk during class I got interested in the whole idea behind the process of creating a mash up. I understand the concept behind using a flow of different songs that have the same tempo and pitch, but I wanted to explore the idea of very contrasting songs being mashed together to become a new song. Ultimately I wanted to prove that these randomly picked songs could work together without using traditional mashup up techniques most DJ’s employ, such as pitch and tempo correction and clever splicing. 
I chose my 3 songs by setting my iTunes to shuffle and playing them through, the first being Outro, by M. Ward, a sad-moody folk guitar orientated instrumental. The second was Football Season Is Over, by Bring Me The Horizon, a screamo hardcore party song with a screw you attitude, and the third being I Need a Doctor by Eminem and Rhianna a rap/pop top 40 song.
 Firstly I decided to keep Rhiannas intro vocal line with M.Wards guitar, they weren’t in the same key or tempo, but they vaguely worked together simply because they were both slow and moody. I decided to splice in parts of the Bring Me The Horizon song at random intervals, when the listener would least expect it, and then during the song the splice points vaguely matched up with points in the M.Ward track that made more sense and felt more natural, but only just. This created a very jolting experience, but oddly enough I found that by the end of the track my ears were used to the odd transitions, and on some level I enjoyed the track. After I found this I opted to play out the last 20 seconds or so with the M.Ward and BMTH song together, the same way I started the song with the Rhianna and M.Ward song. And again the two songs didn’t match up perfectly but worked together as they were both in a minor key and both utilised guitars. After listening back a few times I grew to like the track enough to convince myself that I had succeeded, on a very basic levels the 3 songs have enough in common to work together upon some level, regardless of the fact that traditional musical values are thrown out the window in the editing of this mashup.


Track 3: ‘what makes a mash?’ (Process Development Exercise #3 – based on a specified art movement)

Russolo believed that the human ear over time has grown accustomed to an industrialised sound scape, therefore this new range of musical experiences require a different approach to instrumentation and composition. 

For this PDE I created an entirely new music production process, (or at least new to me). When sitting in a coffee shop on my own during the week I was reading a copy of Lonely Planet, (as im going to Mexico soon) and wondered what it would be like to be a foreigner with no idea of what was being said around me. I zoned out and tried to listen to the conversations around me without hearing any words as a recognizable language. The first thing I noticed was different rhythms in peoples conversations and a natural melodies along with a rise and fall in their emphasis of words and phrases. I recorded a minute or so on my iPhone, and later that day in ProTools I cut out interesting phrases of conversations and noticed that the more I listened to them, the more obvious their rhythm and melody stood out. I then decided I wanted to make a track that would show this phenomenon to people. I did this by repeating each snippet a few times before introducing the next one, occasionally re-visiting an old one. By the end of the first half of the track each segment of conversation should be recognizable to the listener as a separate musical aspect in a way. At the end of the the whole track each snippet plays through once, and this order repeats itself a few times to create a strange rhythm that becomes familiar over time. This recognition through repetition process is the same as the beginning of the track where single snippets are used.

 I found this whole process really eye opening, I sincerely believe that there is an endless list of musical opportunities available to us, but we stick to our traditional musical formulas of beats and tonalities because its just what we are used to.  


Track 4: ‘Conversational Conquest’ (Process Development Exercise #4 – homage to Russolo

One of my favourite bands is Sigur Ros, their shoe gazing sound scapes, featuring a fictional language are as majestic as they are unique. Not many bands come close to creating music like theirs, so I decided to challenge myself to turn Sigur Ros into a pop band by remixing their 9 minute track ‘Von’. I decided that to do this I would need to first determine at least a few generic elements of pop, that my remix would need to recreate. These were as follows;




1. Catchy Melody/Themes
2. Short Chord Progression
3. Repetition of Sections with an Intro and Outro
4. Short

The first thing I tried was to sample out different instrument phrases, and rearrange them. This was a successful system for creating a beat, but I couldn’t cleanly get any other samples from instruments. Also the vocals were so slow and drawn out in their phrasing, they were just unusable. I tried speeding up a section of vocals after attempting to EQ out the instruments, but again it didn’t work very well. After experimenting with other unsuccessful ideas, I decided to simply speed up the song as a whole, which worked really well surprisingly. Once the song was sped up, sections became easily recognizable, and the melodies and chord progressions were catchy and easy to follow. I didn’t feel like I had to do anything else to the song at all, it had lost sound quality, but I feel that this adds to the strange sound of the track. The Sigur Ros track now fulfils enough the requirements of my experiment to be loosely called a pop song.


Track 2: ‘Sigur Pop’ (Process Development Exercise #2 – re-mixed to a different genre/culture)

For this field recording I wanted to present an idea that I’m very familiar with and deal with most days of the week. Having grown up travelling Australia with my family and living in different small towns my whole life, being in the city for college can sometimes do my head in. To represent this I used my Iphone and a Zoom recorder to collect sounds and create a sound scape of both the busy city and a quiet night camping. For the city I recorded a few minutes while walking through the street to capture an ambient background noise, and sat in at a restaurant briefly to record a closer more urgent sound. When I was home that night I recorded a fire that I made in my backyard, and general night ambience. As it had rained like crazy the night before I found a small creek nearby that I recorded as well. When all these sounds together I wanted to do something a bit different than just putting them in an order. I mixed the city noises appropriately, and after 30 seconds or so, snippets of both the city ambience and restaurant sounds start to repeat independently in a subtle way, and decreasing in snippet size. This continues till the city sounds are just a noisy purposeless blur, which represents the way I feel about the city generally, and also gives a sort of “im going insane” effect. Then the calm night ambience fades in to save the day, the track ends with 30 seconds or so of this relaxing sound scape representing peace and a sort of sense of closure, as if the listener themselves have escaped the city and gone away camping.




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