

New.Wavs is a study of the overlapping manner in which contemporary digital culture is produced and consumed, often with the same technological means.

The development of this project consists of identifying a 'definitive' set of tools used in the creation of contemporary music, then pairing them with iconic examples of their use, delineating a type of auditory and stylistic corpus.

Once these sets of material are established, compositional processes may be devised wherein information from these examples (midi notes/CC, spectral content, amplitude, etc) can be mapped back onto the use of the tools themselves, mimicking the recursion that occurs when stylistic tropes made for consumption become available wholesale as building blocks for new cultural production.

This method of creating work with information extracted from the means of its own production hopes to explore the formal structures encoded in both the tools and tropes of digital creation and consumption.
Initial research for this project has focused on the Lex Luger sample pack, a free collection of drum samples and VSTs available online and geared towards the creation of 'trap music', a popular subset of hip hop exemplified by the work of Lex Luger, whose production style has been widely imitated since it first achieved mainstream success in 2010.

Studies for New.Wavs have taken every song from the Billboard Hot 100 produced by Lex Luger as a source of compositional data, using each song as input material to be analyzed for structural form and content, then routing that analysis back onto a variety of production systems containing the Lex Luger sample set with no other intervention.

This process will result in the creation of a set of pieces lasting the same duration as their input sources, and represent an attempt to apply a Cage-ian embrace of indeterminacy to the context of commercial production, as well as an attempt to turn the gaze of contemporary consumption back on itself, taking out the middleman and creating a metaphorical network of self-propagating digital culture.

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Plastic Machine Music represents an ongoing study of the plasticity of digital media. After sourcing a library of online detritus in the form of YouTube advertisements, source material is arranged through simple generative processes and intuitive orchestration. This series functions as both a suite of fixed media etudes, and a gestural vocabulary for use in performance.


New.Wavs

Initial sketch for New.Wavs. All sonic material derived from the 'Lex Luger Drum Kit' sample library. All compositional information drawn from the 2010 chart hit 'Blowing Money Fast' by Rick Ross, produced by Lex Luger. 

Audio analysis and subsequent mapping via Max/MSP and Ableton Live 9. 

New.Wavs

Matthew D Gantt