kernel_panic

Short example composition project for my Music Theory/Aural Skills course. By including work in DAWs, students can explore the basic tenets of recording and editing audio, as well as composing electronic music using homemade recordings. 

In this example, a single voice sings a major scale -- asending and desceding from scale degrees 1-5 -- on "la." From there, the scale is spliced into individual notes and pasted to new tracks, in canon. As harmonies develop over time, a bass line, drums, and synth all enter and are derived from the Reason VST suite of tools.

Original sample here: https://freesound.org/people/mooncubedesign/sounds/442571/

On 'La'

For Eb clarinet and percussion with heart rate monitors (for tempo).

Written for and premiered by Jennifer Tinberg and Benjamin Fraley.

A Curtain Of Stars

Invited to compose music for the inaugural ceremony of Dr. Kristin Esterberg, I couldn't help but find it the perfect opportunity to collaborate with our talented students in electronic and computer music at the State University of New York at Potsdam's Crane School of Music. 

According to the score that I designed, each participating member was tasked with capturing fifty individual audio recordings from fifty random locations on our campus, which were mixed together and diffused in the Helen Hosmer Gallery prior to and after the inaugural ceremony. 

Together, Potsdam Mix celebrates our vibrant campus life and showcases the unbending creativity, hard work, and talent of our students.

Potsdam Mix

My musical practice has recently focused on unconventional approaches to guitar performance, prioritizing texture and gesture, relying on abrupt transitions, sharp attack, feedback, and timbral shifts effected by manipulating pickup toggles and switches. Superaero explores the liminal space between intent and accident, sourcing recordings of my guitar improvisations and glitch sounds that continue to inspire me: static from broken cables, clicks, pops, sharp percussive attacks, abstract, fractured grooves, and angular rhythms permeate this sound world. Deliberately invoking the “superaero” pursuit of maximum efficiency against resistance found in cycling, every gesture, texture, and digital artifact in this work was sculpted for expressive immediacy and forward momentum.

Superaero

A guided meditation by Frank Ostaseski, on a teaching by Roshi Joan Halifax. 

Strong Back, Soft Front

Passacaglia

“Whence things have their origin, there they must also pass away according to necessity; for they must pay penalty and be judged for their injustice, according to the ordinance of time.”
-- Nietzsche’s translation of the Anaximander fragment

Meditation in the Apeiron

A brief fixed media work utilizing the songs and teachings of Sister Chan Khong of the Plum Village Mindfulness Practice Center. Gratefully dedicated to her and the work of those who practice mindfulness everywhere.

Dear Friends

Working on subtly shifting rhythms + textures. 

Percussion = Make Noise DPO, STO, tELHARMONIC, Optomix, LxD, MATHS, ModDEMIX, Møffenzeef GMØ, Muskrat

Rhythms = Make Noise TEMPI, Møffenzeef Mitø, Make Noise Richter Wogglebug, Wiard Wogglebug

Samples = Bastl Instruments grandPA + SPA, Make Noise Phonogene

Will continue cobbling together my growing collection of recorded improvisations for a summer Bandcamp album.

2018-0406Track1

“Improvisation is a game that the mind plays with itself, in which an idea is allowed to enter the playing field, in order to be kicked around in pleasing patterns for a moment before being substituted by another idea. The first idea is unintentional, an error, a wrong note, a fumble in which the ball is momentarily lost, a momentary surfacing of an unconscious impulse normally kept under cover. The play to which it is subjected is the graceful recovery of the fumbled ball, a second ‘wrong’ note that makes the first one seem right, the justification for allowing the idea to be expressed in the first place.”

“Improvisation tells us: Anything is possible—anything can be change—now.”—Frederic Rzewski

Improvisation (with Paul Schuette)

“Improvisation is a game that the mind plays with itself, in which an idea is allowed to enter the playing field, in order to be kicked around in pleasing patterns for a moment before being substituted by another idea. The first idea is unintentional, an error, a wrong note, a fumble in which the ball is momentarily lost, a momentary surfacing of an unconscious impulse normally kept under cover. The play to which it is subjected is the graceful recovery of the fumbled ball, a second ‘wrong’ note that makes the first one seem right, the justification for allowing the idea to be expressed in the first place.”

“Improvisation tells us: Anything is possible - anything can be change - now.”  -Frederic Rzewski

Schuette<>Sommerfeldt Duo - Live at SPLICE

The wondrous number algorithm - outlined by Douglas Hofstadter in Gödel, Escher, Bach - has a simple set of rules: A number is chosen at random and "if it is odd, we triple it and add 1. If it is even, we take half of it." The process produces a series of numbers that increase and decrease until the number 1 is reached, thus ending the procedure.
Setting this into RTcmix, I produced strings of numbers to determine various musical parameters in this fixed-media work: Lengths (in seconds) of sections, formal layout, frequencies, amplitudes, and other intrinsic elements of signal processing were all derived from the wondrous number set to create a sound world that is both glitchy, biting, and intensely delicate.

Jerod Sommerfeldt

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