The practice of perpetuating chants in Polynesian culture is essential to the survival of our culture and tradition. Being Samoan, It only seemed fit to take the project back to my roots and share with you a little piece of where I'm from. Polynesians use chanting as an avenue for artistic expression. There are many types of chants; a chant to serenade a lover, a chant of loss to help the grieving process, or a war chant before engaging in battle to intimidate another warrior. 

The chants I used in this project are taken from different war chants performed before Polynesian Rugby Teams play each other (engage in battle)  see (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vebdLynhQMk). Each Polynesian island has a specific war chant. The ones I used here are from the islands of New Zealand, Tonga, Fiji and Samoa.

For the first thirty seconds, I used a Fijian celebration chant. I wanted to show the beauty of the Polynesian singing voices before I introduced the listener to a more serious type of chant. I then chopped up the Fijian chant (0.30 - 0.33) and changed the pitch within each drop. I scattered different war chants throughout the piece for dramatic effect because I wanted to showcase the intensity of the war chanting. For the underlying track, I chose to use dub-step songs because I felt that music paired specifically well with the strong male vocals. The toughest part was trying to match the pitches of the intensified chanting with the dub-step music. At 1:45, I made very small cuts to the underlying track and looped it  to try my hand at creating a dub-step beat.

So, here I present you with a cultural rendition of Polynesian chants with a DJ mix of dub-step instrumentals.

Chants of Polynesia - Etude 5

Goodbye, But Not Forever

An original piece written to ease the pain of loss. Not only was this my first original song to compose completely and entirely by myself, this was also my first attempt at harmonizing with my own recorded voice using three other voices (0:55s). All recordings were recorded right off of a Galaxy sIII phone. With a little(lot of) beat boxing, singing, ukuleleing, cutting and pasting, and technomusicologing, came this song .

Lyrics

Goodbye, but not forever.
You'll always be in my heart.
Like birds, we flock together,
From the end and to the start.

We may go, but we're never gone,
Like some fish in an endless pond. 
Those who go and those who stay,
Will sure be the ones who say

Goodbye, but not forever.
You'll always be in my heart.
Like birds, we flock together,
From the end and to the start.

-LYRICS-

Goodbye, but not forever
You'll always be in my heart.
Like birds, we flock together, 
from the end to the start.

We may go, but we're never gone
like some fish in an endless pond.
Those who go, and those who stay,
will surely be the ones who say.

Goodbye, but not forever
You'll always be in my heart.
Like birds, we flock together, 
from the end and to the start.

One_EYE_Samurai

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