Black Window is a fixed-media reflection on how mass media functions as a sort of window - just like a true window, it lets us see what’s going on elsewhere and what we see in it influences our mental and emotional state. Unlike a real window, what we see may not pertain to our immediate situation, and it’s easy to lose yourself in it and become consumed with worries you may have no ability to address. The piece’s sections feature news broadcasts from the first year of the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic as a refrain throughout the piece, interspersed with materials recorded in the home or prior to the pandemic to represent noises of the immediate surroundings as well as synthesized materials to represent an unspecified self’s mental processes in response to circumstances and surroundings. 

Presented as a final project for MUSI 4582 (Composition II) at the University of Virginia on 5/8/2021 and premiered at Digitalis 2021 on 5/13/2021.

Black Window

I can't quite decide if this is electro house or progressive house. Help me decide in the comments!

Boom (Original Mix)

Ugly gets the Stringtone treatment.

Created using Dada Life's One Smile Files, which can be downloaded for free here: https://soundcloud.com/dada-life/sets/one-smile-files

Dada Life - One Smile (Stringtone Remix)

Six months in the making, and I'm finally finished. I am proud to present my bootleg of Idina Menzel's Let It Go. 

Idina Menzel - Let It Go (Stringtone Extended Bootleg)

Official remix for the Splice competition. SoundCloud if you take this down I swear to God

Show me some love on Splice for the remix comp: https://splice.com/violord/pendulum---granite-stringtone-remix

As much fun as making house music has been it's starting to get a little stale. It's gonna be more varied from here on out.

Pendulum - Granite (Stringtone Remix)

it's a trap

Presented as my final project for MUSI 3310 at the University of Virginia.

Go Somewhere, Do Something

no sleep, no dreams is a binaural composition written as an abstract representation of an overworked, sleep-deprived state of mind. Relatively loose in form, the heavy use of spatialization evokes a sense of mental distance and ill-focus.

The composition explores spatialization through the use of binaural panning, reverb/delay and filtering, and slight phasing. In order to reflect on more human elements of modern life that are often buried by all the work that has to get done and other moods that may come from existing in that state of mind, the piece also features edited recordings of sung melodies and spoken word borrowed from songs by Madeon, Gnarls Barkley, and Gesaffelstein. 

The composition is a reflection on a modern culture that prizes productivity and accomplishment over, and all too often to the exclusion of, time spent doing anything not toward those ends. It also indirectly comments on the normalization of unsustainable practices like chronic sleep deprivation that seem necessary to function in, and sometimes even celebrated by, the society in which we live and work. The titular phrase, spoken by both a person and a speech synthesizer in English, Spanish, and Dutch, evokes a more complex idea – if we work so hard just to get by that we no longer meet fundamental needs, do we lose sight of the dreams that make us human? What separates a life like that from the life of an undreaming machine? Is it possible to be truly happy and fulfilled with such an existence?

Presented as a final project for MUSI 3390 (Intro to Music and Computers) at the University of Virginia, 9 December 2019. Headphones recommended.

no sleep, no dreams

oizys with many faces is an electroacoustic composition for viola and live electronics written as a meditation on the process of accepting and moving on from disappointment and loss. The four sections represent the despair, fury, renewed melancholy colored with frustration, and a sense of renewed purpose to take another shot, for better or for worse, that follow an initial failure to achieve one’s dreams. 

It’s often said that grief has many faces – no two people will grieve the same way and people may go through phases of grief before coming to a place of acceptance where they can make peace with Oizys, the Greek goddess of despair who wears different faces for everyone she meets. 

This piece uses both live and fixed electronics to explore the juxtaposition between the need to allow oneself to feel and the need to move on. To lend to the idea that our emotions are a product of both our surroundings and our responses to them, all but one of the sounds used in this composition are edited viola recordings.

Presented as a final project for MUSI 4582 (Composition 2) at the University of Virginia, 28 April 2020.

oizys with many faces (for viola and live electronics)

Producer, composer, violist, and former percussionist

Stringtone

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