Music has surrounded me ever since I was a child. The schools would sing songs to teach us content, and generations bonded over childhood music. Family events featured karaoke and sing-a-longs, the radio filled car rides with constant tunes that fell into the background, my mother and sibling would practice piano as I fell asleep upstairs. Kids toys and television feature musical elements in the form of songs and sound effects. Music is integral to childhood, and exists throughout everyone’s life: defining generations and bringing people together through a human commonality. I chose to transform typical sounds of a child’s toy box into an unsettlingly familiar tune with unconventional silences and timings, representing unplanned stresses that arise once one outgrows this underappreciated blissful time of life.
The ambiance created by the initial bells seem harmless yet confusing at first, but that confusion melts away once it falls into a regular rhythm. Micro sounds of various toys create a “melody” that fits into the rhythm without the comfort of “pitch” that we recognize. These micro sounds soon become hasty then silence halts everything, disorienting the listener. Another ambient sound of an accordion-sounding toy provides a typical rhythmic and melodic noise, but the vocals of a toy singing a completely different melody clashes with the accordion. Subtle micro sounds of clicking start and finish, leading to another silence that halts all sound: still concerning, but made even more so by ensuring this silence is significantly shorter than the previous, subverting expectations and disorienting the listener once again. The clicking foreshadowed the musical box sounds that play after the silence, accompanied by the relatively empty ambiance of a toy race car zooming around a track. Once the music box prepares to loop its melody, the car crashes, and the piece ends.
I had always been interested in experimenting with silence in music and how that can change the flow of a piece. Changing the value of silence throughout this piece truly showed me the power silence has on a piece and how smooth it feels overall, which can be manipulated to lull the listener into a sense of comfort or dread. Additionally, I love exploring the fine line between noise and music, which I believe makes percussion the interesting type of music it is. Rhythm is integral to music, and drifting in and out of a regular rhythm can really emphasize how music appears and disappears throughout life, but it is always there if one tries to understand it enough. I made this piece with the intention of creating an unsettling atmosphere with cheerful children’s toys, and I ended up creating a piece that represented 3 major stages of life: unconditionally enjoying the blissful chaos of childhood, suddenly fighting to maintain one’s individuality despite also fighting to fit into society, solemnly looking back at the peaceful times until it’s too late to remember anymore. Life is quick and ruthless; the experiences we have must be cherished to push us through life’s darkest times.

Our Toy Box

I remember starting this project with too much thought; I was intimidated by the provided list. I wanted to find the “best” possible sounds in my environment to meet every requirement. Moreover, I had to learn what terms such as “dark” and “airy” even meant. What determines the darkness or density of a sound anyway? I listened to the sounds around me wasn’t satisfied for quite a while. It was a few days later when I decided to just record something: anything. Recording just one sound led to another, and another, and I had a diverse stash of original and personal sounds in no time: some akin to stock footage, others unique to me and to those around me. I marveled at the sounds I never would have noticed otherwise: rain hitting leaves, the unintelligible yet hypnotic conversations around me.
The sounds my partner provided were also varied and familiar. I could guess and imagine where the sounds came from, while still being surprised that these everyday sounds, different from mine, had hidden melodies and rhythms that I never noticed before. I also very much enjoyed listening to his take on how my sounds, the sounds I captured on a whim most of the time while talking walks around campus, could create hidden melodies and rhythms.
I wanted to explore more within my comfort zone with this piece, so I stuck with a focus on rhythm and interesting meters, hopefully layering them in such a way that individual tracks seem to mesh and collaborate somehow. Not only that, but I also had access to small touches of melody (since having some pitched sounds was a requirement), so I played a little with that given the rhythm established, although this wasn't too in-depth. It was interesting transforming sounds that originally were so raw into produced hits that could invoke a pulse and create somewhat of a story since the sounds were still very real.

thank you sam

To be honest, I sort of did this project in the opposite order, by simply losing myself in making the music and creating the storyboard afterwards. However, I just found this to be the most genuine way for me to compose my piece. I was motivated by what I just found interesting (what we learned about in class and what I came across while researching Reaper techniques), and playing around with the DAW enough eventually produced a piece for me. This song naturally emerged from my curiosity and drive to play with certain techniques, thus its title. More specifically, I was very intrigued by the idea of engineering a sound from its purest form: sine waves. The possibility of having any sound available to me, whether it has been heard before or not, was empowering and reminded me of my initial desire to explore computers and music. I could take my time (within reason which was a week) to craft any sound I wanted and arrange them in any way I wanted that can be recorded and played perfectly every time with a click of a button. Not only that, but the fact that my instruments were original and I saw through the whole process of constructing them gives me the comfort I need to believe that I can truly create music through my efforts alone. Creating this piece was surprisingly cathartic too, as I toyed around with my keyboard to see what tunes emerged. Eventually, I found that what I had created thus far had resembled me as a person to a surprising degree: it’s obvious I took inspiration from video game music (specifically Animal Crossing) and lofi hip hop, but I’m amazed that I didn’t do so deliberately. After listening to my finished piece and reflecting on how it came to be, I realized the common theme of emergence throughout my process: I never planned out the melodies, instruments, mood of the music, etc. They simply emerged when I played with a sine wave, thought about how it may work in a piece, and saved it to use later. I enjoyed a thought that came to me: that this is analogous to biological evolution and the jarring idea that, no matter how simple an individual component is, enough of them can create the most complex and advanced mechanism. As a result of making these simple components, I now have a folder of sounds that I made that could be used in future projects (e.g. I accidentally made a church organ instrument when trying to make a saxophone). I’m excited to make more music with this method (it’s like surprising myself with a new piece every time) and reflecting on it afterwards to learn more about myself and music creation in general. The storyboard was a great motivator to allow myself to be truly mindful about what we’re learning, and I believe the storyboard speaks for itself.

emergence

This mix was produced for nonprofit, educational purposes.

There were many approaches I wanted to explore when starting this project, and although I came into this project with the idea that I was going to “embrace simplicity” like I said in class, I ended up exploring more with the potential in song variety and ended up with quite a jumbled piece. During this project, I was fascinated more with the idea that I can put existing songs together, despite them never being made for each other; I made sure to test this idea as far as possible by sourcing from varied genres of music: rock, classical orchestra, funk, hip hop. I believe this may have stemmed from my recent interest in metal covers of existing nonmetal songs that I enjoy. The metal timbre empowers the songs, giving even the most relaxing and soothing melodies the motivating, adrenaline-pumping feel that metalheads typically love while still maintaining the original message of the song. I definitely want to explore this style of music-making more in the future, and I hope to better organize my project files in order to do so, given the amount of sourcing necessary for the project. It was this project that made me realize the importance of color-coding one’s tracks and planning ahead for what one might need in a track, although this is because of the limitations of using pre-recorded material rather than making material from scratch. Therefore, maybe a mix of original work that’s accompanied by samples (rather than all samples or all original work) would be interesting to explore. Although I may not be the most talented mixer, with enough time, even I see the potential in these songs accompanying each other, and I believe this class has taught me enough skills to put that into action (again, with enough time). Finally, the name of the piece, “Previdence,” I thought was fun since “pre” implies it precedes even “pro,” and this piece is like a very, very early stage of potentially quality track.

Previdence

Coming into this final project, I was somewhat overwhelmed by the sheer amount of possibility here, and I definitely have many ideas that I would like to see in music. However, I know that time is limited, so I quickly focused my attention on a single feature that I believed I could effectively demonstrate in this project. This idea was to limit every rhythm in the song to the rhythms of certain messages in morse; these messages would be words that related to me (which I thought was like “injecting” myself into the song).
However, despite the rhythms being quite interesting and serviceable in small chunks, using certain longer words and layering these rhythms on top of each other only muddled up the piece. At first this idea was supposed to stretch my creativity by guiding me along a unique path, but it ended up being stifling: it ruined my improvisational creativity and I found myself thinking, “I wish I could make this sound different” constantly while making the melodies of this song. But I realized that I could change it, it was arbitrary restrictions that I had set for myself that held me back. Restrictions such as striving for something completely innovative and “new” was holding me back from making a song that I thought was fun and free-flowing. Besides, I still kept a single morse rhythm to use as a backing track, which created an interesting-enough odd meter and irregular beat to keep my piece from feeling “plain.”
Now that I’ve taken a step back and reevaluated where I am with the project, I found myself scrambling a little bit to meet the deadline. What’s simplest to do, I guess, was to work with the beat I already had and let my creativity flow when creating the melody lyrics (vocals being another aspect I wanted to try out since I couldn’t use my original idea). Thus, I played some progressing chords on my keyboard and picked the phrase that sounded nice to me, then wrote lyrics that rolled off my tongue: just my thoughts in the moment; obviously editing them to rhyme.
Reflecting on the final product, I would like to tweak the percussive instrumentation to be more "drowsy" and my voice to be more intelligible. For the future, I would like to continue playing with my voice in music, hopefully becoming a better singer and producer in the process. Moreover, I plan to expand my horizons into making music that I personally enjoy and emulating pieces that I admire. Especially since learning about composing background music for media, I would like to explore that type of emotion-invoking music more: creating video-game-esque tracks.

misterfancybananaman