Here're to Good Times montage2

Vocals Leonie Pelteret and Hannelore Olivier, Mario Cronje

Kallini with ZEEQ

With Sti-ing sound design I’m commenting on how audiences are frequently more interested in capturing and owning a  much lower quality representation of a musical experience, than being fully present when original music is happening in reality. We are so addicted to capturing and sharing our experiences immediately with others on digital and social media, that we do not experience the event when it happens right in front of us in present time. 

I went to see Sting live in 2012 at Grandwest, and recorded a sample of one of his most well-known songs on a blackberry smartphone. During the live performance many people, even in the front being a few meters away from the artist, experienced Sting mostly through the small screen of their mobile phones, as they were busy capturing the show, sharing on facebook, sending to friends. Missing the live experience by focusing on getting an immediate (lower-quality) version which resembles the real experience in a very small and distorted way, this will be their memory of the music and the artist.

I used my very low quality phone recording, and mixed it in a track with the same song which I bought on CD; as well with a Mp3-version which I downloaded for free from the internet. The actual song is never heard in totality as the artist intended it, and fragments of the chorus jump between the 3 versions of the same song. In the same way we have the ability to skip parts in music which we do not prefer on digital devices- listening only to the ‘good’ parts and disregarding the original form of the song. There is a very long intro, which resembles the build-up to a concert of this magnitude -  but contaminated by spectators capturing a secondhand-experience of the real atmosphere and energy of the live music.

Sti- ing sound design

For sale online at laudanumproductions.com


In ‘AADA’ I created  a soundtrack based on the idea of old tape machine-record and playback-noise, and  AAD-‘noise’,  which people complaint about especially in the beginning years of the transition from tape machines and records to digital compact disks. CD’s promised to deliver sound in a much clearer way, which could be reproduced without any loss of quality. The problem with this was that low quality analog records and tapes were simply sampled, with all the original tape-noise, into a digital format, which were then duplicated with the built-in flaw of low-quality sound as original.  One were warned against listening to ‘AAD-disks’; the irony of course being that these cd’s were the cheapest and most accessible to buy. The ‘digitally remastered’ AAD-copies frequently resulted in a ‘performance’ of even lower sound quality than listening to the real tapes and records they originated from. The music could be turned ‘louder’ than the original analog tapes and records with mastering, but the handicap of a low bit-rate resulted in the noise levels being louder also, with a loss to the intended dynamics and timbre of the music.

AADA - track part of CD 'Concert To' - laudanumproductions.com

composed for http://criticallandscapesblog.wordpress.com/

Clay-sound

During travels to North India, Southeast Asia and around South Africa,  I recorded sounds to remember these landscapes and the people living in them: a Sample of distorted wind blowing prayer-flags in Sikkim; an evening soundscape in Zambia,a Buddhist monk sounding an overwhelmingly loud ringing prayer-wheel in Thailand; and Katrina Esau, the last remaining fluent speaker of N|uu recorded in the Northern Cape. All these sounds are heard in the music for Pentatonic -  ‘bamboo forest’- layered as harmonies to the instrumental melody.

For the melodic themes, I measured the height- and counted the amount- of segments in the ceramic pieces to create a pentatonic scale based on the measurements. The velocity of each note in the 5-note scale represents the height of a certain shoot in the ‘forest’; thus the landscape of the ceramic pieces can truly be seen in the software of the musical score. I chose 5 main ceramic ‘shoots’ to be the source notes, counting in semitones from ‘C’, and received the notes c-a-f-g-c#. The scale represents the 5 elements used in creating clay art. It competes with the dissonant harmonies until it comes ‘home’ in a soothing piano melody at the end of the line of ceramic pieces - resting on a single green shoot: life from earth again.

Pentatonic

The soundscape for Clay-Sound is inspired by sounds as byproducts of the artistic process in Laura du Toit’s studio. Human hands interacting with clay; the flow of water used in creation; the staccato-pitches of heat escaping from the potters fire - all random sounds in the transition of virgin clay to art, and mostly ignored as part of the creative process. But when listening carefully, these random sounds organize themselves eventually into rhythm, timbre, harmony - composing a soundtrack for the broken earth. For the first part of the exhibition (3 pots) I composed a track mixing these sounds with acoustic instruments and analog synthesizers. A drone-tone beat of brick-making as bass-line. The pain of a ruined and broken earth echoes in the dissonance of polytonal piano and organ sounds, which fight for harmonic and melodic survival in the landscape of sound.

During travels to North India, Southeast Asia and around South Africa, I recorded sounds to remember these landscapes and the people living in them. a Sample of distorted wind blowing prayer-flags in Sikkim; a Buddhist monk sounding an overwhelmingly loud ringing prayer-wheel in Thailand; a Khoisan lady speaking in her mother-tongue in the Northern Cape. All these sounds are heard in the soundtrack for Laura’s ‘bamboo forest’- layered as harmonies to the melody.

For the melodic themes, I measured the height- and counted the amount- of segments in the ceramic pieces to create a pentatonic scale based on the measurements. The velocity of each note of the 5-note scale represents the height of a certain shoot in the ‘forest’; thus the landscape of the ceramic pieces can truly be seen in the software of the musical score. I chose 5 main ceramic ‘shoots’ to be the source notes, counting in semitones from ‘C’, and received the notes c-a-f-g-c#. The scale represents the 5 elements used in creating clay art. It competes with the dissonant harmonies until it comes ‘home’ in a soothing piano melody at the end of the line of ceramic pieces - resting on a single green shoot: live from earth again.

Soundscape composed for Hearing Landscape Critically 2013

Tracklist:

Feel Alive
Dewinter (Turn It Around)
Havitall (Feat. Lezanne)
You Alone Are All I Desire
It's In Your Heart
Don't Go Away
Kallini (Radio Edit)
Gentle Dance
Over And Over
Spend A Little Time With Me
Morning
Little Silence
Jaipur
This Is The Time (For Soleil)

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ZeeQ Mix 1

Tracklist:

Wake Up
It's In Your Heart (Radio Edit)
Don't Go Away (Edit)
The Meaning (Chill Mix)
Tears Are Falling
Gentle Dance (B)
Dominose
Let's Start Jamming
From Pacha With Love
Climation
River
The Meaning (Original Mix)

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Pentatonic

Hannelore Olivier

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