EAST 300 Assignment 7: A series of short études made to evoke different textures.

Texture Étude 2: Pointillism

Texture Étude 1: Minimal

Transformed soundscape created with field recordings from around Concordia University and "Mia and Sebastian's Theme" from La La Land.

Recordings by:
Sam Donald
Matt Jacobson
Zoe Jacole
Jackson Mill

Transformed Soundscape (Stereo Reduction)

EAST 205 Assignment 4
"Arrival meets La La Land"

Program Note:

"To whom it may concern,

While contact with the new world is spotty, several recordings are archived from our communications with these new beings in the hope we can one day communicate with them. The following is an analysis of one such recording we received from our transmission with the intergalactic “Sirius” probe.

This recording follows the musings of two aliens: Dot and Dash. Dot is the female, voicing more melismatic tones and fricative stops. Dash is the male and is characterized by more percussive, guttural gestures. While their names are an allusion to the “dot-dash” system of notation in morse code, the meanings are reversed.

While we as researchers know little about this species or their language, guiding principles have been derived from Karlheinz Stockhausen’s four criteria of electronic music. It appears their speech is based on four parameters having to do with time structuring, splitting sound, directional movement and a noise/sound continuum.

The time structuring indicates urgency of communication. Higher frequencies indicate that attention should be paid to the gesture. Longer tones and gestures imply the importance of a particular frequency. Similarly the “transients” - the percussive onsets of their vocal gestures - denote proclamations. Transients involve a quick pitch shift down many octaves, leading us to believe that this is how they relate to unified time structuring.

Splitting of sound denotes uncertainty. Questions often begin with one unified frequency multiplying into many in a process we call “branching”. The uncertainty is not resolved until these branches revert back into a unified tone. We call this “trunking”. Branching and trunking are readily apparent in Dot’s vocal performance, although Dash’s splitting of sound is based on the superimposition of multiple voices at once.

Directional movement is the third parameter by which we categorize their communication, or “multi-layered spatial composition” as it was known to Stockhausen. The directional aspect of the speech indicates the direction of the statement. When the self is the subject, the sound is generated near the self. However, when the “other” is the subject, the sound is “thrown” in that direction. In this way all beings of this species have a “vocal space” - a reverberation unique to their character that follows the movement of intention - and a gravitational “sound space” - a personal reverberation field that sounds the same as their first field, where all speech pertaining to them sticks.

Finally, the continuum between sound and noise. At one end, there exists a pure sinusoidal wave. At the other, pure random white noise. This is a spectrum of formality through precision. The closer a sound is to the pure sine tone, the more specific and formal the statement. If it is heavily shrouded by noise, this can make it simultaneously harder to understand as well as informal.

These notes have been made in the hopes that we will one day communicate with these beings and share a common language.

Kindest regards,
Dr. Maxwell Power"

Alien Music: The Ballad of Dot and Dash (Stereo Reduction)

A conversation between an AI and creator, 'Do-it-yourself-Artificial-Intelligence' is a piece that details our developing relationship with technology.

Created for Concordia Electroacoustics II (EAST 305)

DIYAI (Stereo Reduction)

'Meditations' is a 60 second excerpt of a larger piece of the same name. Swooshing noise sweeps enter and exit to the tempo of the composer's breath, and are layered over each other to create a texture that at once symbolizes everything and nothing.

Created for Concordia Electroacoustics II (EAST 305)

Meditations (60x60)

Windfall is composed as a classically constructed pop song, with all of the instruments obfuscated by or replaced with noise and reverb.

Created for Concordia Electroacoustics II (EAST 305)

Windfall (Stereo Reduction)

Electroacoustic compositions by S.E. Donald created for Concordia University Electroacoustics Program