Di Drew - You'll Never Be Alone

Harry Tran - Loose Thread

I multi-sampled Grainger’s 3 octave wooden marimba in this piece titled ‘Tour du Monde’. Much of Grainger’s life was spent on tour, and through the piece I’ve aimed to capture a theme of travel in the early 20th century (train, boat, horse and carriage etc). The piece encapsulates the sound of views that could be seen from these modes of transport. I explored spatialisation of the instrumental lines via panning left and right in the stereo listening field. This creates movement amongst the colours of the piece. Effects such as reverb and delay are used to further enhance the panning and sense of movement.

Rupert Buesst - Tour Du Monde

Creating a digital sampler instrument from Grainger's metal marimba, I then created a reflection on my year through the lens of Percy Grainger. The atmosphere of the piece is centered on a dense sound collage made out of additional sample recordings I made around Melbourne, as well as various interviews and news pieces about Percy Grainger. The digital instrument has been further manipulated through pitch shifting and reverse processing.. 
-Strong influence of storytelling through harmony

Rory Vagg - 'Pagodas'

Sampled from Percy Grainger’s Metal Marimba, a spacious musical soundscape is created through polyphonic harmonies recreated on an Ableton MIDI sampler keyboard. The piece centralises on ideas of tension, evoked sonically through additive polyphony, contrasting cool and warm equalised marimbas, unexpected time signature changes, microtonal modulations from C minor to C half sharp minor and juxtapositional binaural positioning of themes to create a sense of the uncanny.

Nathan Zammit - Eternality

While I  focussed on the Grainger's Metallophone/Glock instrument , I also incorporated historical samples to make explicit connection to Grainger and his work. The Metallophone is manipulated in all sorts of ways. Quotations of Grainger’s music are used as well as Grainger’s voice (sourced from interviews). The instrument dances around Grainger’s voice unpredictably, as it seems Grainger tries to grapple down a musical idea that he is chasing.

Richard Munro - Metallophone/Glock

Every single sound in this piece comes from samples taken from Grainger’s metallophone that were made into a unique digital instrument. In particular, noisy recorded fragments and even ‘mistakes’ from the sampling process – the ‘off-cuts’ were used to help create a very percussive and timbral atmosphere. Additionally, sound processing including delay, chorus, flanger, modulating reverb spaces, hass and doppler effects, volume, panning and filtering were used to create movement in the stereo listening space

Ben Salter - The Only Instrument of It's Kind In The World

This is a dance music piece built from samples from Grainger’s marimbaphone. It is in three distinct sections to show the evolution of how the sampled instrument is used. At the start it is slow and ambient, gradually picking up until at the end it is quite busy, fast, and barely recognisable.

Serge Balaam - Changes

This piece titled ‘Gold Hands’ is an ode to the idea of hands, and how they are our brain’s vehicle for our creative endeavours. Basing my piece off the image of Edward Gall’s ‘Gold Hands, the piece centers around the pianola, drawing inspiration from Goll’s pianist background as well as composer Percy Grainger’s story and his pianola experiments. The piece combines processed and delayed pianola riffs built from a sampled pianola hat create a constant rhythm to the piece, and intimate panned vocal lines that open up into overlapping patterns and polyrhythms. I imagine this piece to be listened to with headphones with the accompanying image of Edward Goll’s Gold Hands, or alternatively printed on a pianola scroll to be played by members of the audience as they wander through the exhibition.
*simplified pianola version has been arranged and recorded.

Holly Sweeney - Gold Hands

No. 1​ is a sound experiment, inspired by​ Percy Grainger’s Free Music​ that takes ocean wave height data (metres) from the coast of Victoria and converts it to audio frequency (Hz) as performance input for a multi-sample instrument.
A literal approach to the story of Grainger’s dreams of gliding tones while watching the ocean near his home as a child, this piece uses the strict guidelines of his original score as a framework for data manipulation, attempting to hear what the contours of the ocean ​actually sound like.

Dom Willmott - No. 1 As Free And As Infinitely Variable As The Waves

When looking into the multivocal exhibition I found myself very drawn to the sense of community engagement and acceptance that’s been evident in Melbourne University art societies throughout history. The following photo of the Melbourne University Choral Society particularly moved me with its powerful depiction of authentic, pure joy and love. It brought memories of times, often with family or friends, when I have felt this same simplistic happiness and content. Through the compositions orchestration and melodic structure as well as the incorporation of the classic tune Waltzing Matilda, I aim to explore themes of nostalgia and sentiment in this piece.

Rue Curnow

Death as an Island is an exploration of space and an experimentation of story through sound, rather than lyric. Initially starting close and quiet, the piece develops to a full and overwhelming chaos of noise, symbolising a simultaneous descent into madness and metaphorical descent into the abyss. The lyrical content within the song highlights the story being told by the music, but is juxtaposed by its own contextual genre, first appearing as an isolated piece of music before becoming part of the overall soundscape.
Once we welcome each other to share and collaborate across cultures we can create unique melting pots of sound and music.

Josh Trappett - Death As An Island

“Unison” responds to the theme of “music and wellbeing” within the Multivocal Exhibition. It reflects on how choirs have offered a source of community and healing within the university and beyond, aiming to convey a sense of calm, warmth, and presence. The piece centres on a layered multivocal sample surrounded by evolving synthesiser textures.

Liam Harper - Unison

This work was inspired by the Sol-fa chart made by Samuel McBurney which depicts hand- drawn birds to represent the notes of the scale. The tweeting of birds, which introduces and concludes the piece, as well as the vocal ‘do re mi’ synth present throughout the work’s entirety establishes a direct link with the chart. My main intention was to communicate something inspired by the birds of the chart. More specifically, the freedom and joy of letting go of worries and feeling weightless – a feeling of flying – represented through the lyric “Look at yellow skies, wish that you could fly.”

Miranda Kirby - Sol-fa

‘Her Time’ is powered by a photograph of Georgette Peterson. She is depicted in session and strength, her arms raised and empowered. I was inspired by Georgette and her place in sound, to render a work of music which unfurls feminine presence and progress in music. Through woman like Georgette we are here. It is an ode to her spirit, and the spirit of women who continue to forge. Formed using a multisample instrument made from a cello.

Emma Beilharz - HER TIME

Looking at the multivocal exhibition, I was struck by the devotion paid to individual, historically significant instruments – Wayne Stuart’s microtonal piano, Meredith Moon’s spinet, etc. To me, the act of multisampling an instrument also seemed like a devotional act – paying it time and labour to capture its unique character. This composition, Piano Study, is an exploration of my family’s piano, an instrument I’ve known my whole life. Almost all the sounds you’ll hear are processed multisamples of it – it is a study of the piano in all its minutiae, expressed in a way that could never be done live.

Joel Keith - Piano Study

The work was inspired by Spaces and Places. Itʼs responding to the idea that music happens all over the University and the experience of moving throughout campus. I explored this concept in relation to interesting sounds in everyday environments, and how as we travel through them, we carry music that transforms these spaces. The piece begins with a linear journey through different locations beginning at a music hall, to home. Then, it explores how all the sounds can interact together.

Pendar - Spaces Places

I was inspired by the Music Across Cultures section of the Multivocal exhibition. To explore this topic, I put music to three of my sister’s poems about Greek identity resulting in a musical reimagining of three poems from Mortal, a poetry collection by Alicia Spyropoulos. The poems explore themes of Greek identity, mythology, family, and self- discovery. As the poetry weaves family life and childhood memories with epic mythology and ancient history, the soundscape combines field recordings from Greek households and villages with music that emulates the sound of Ancient Greece. I sampled numerous Greek instruments such as bouzouki, toubeleki, doumbek, and lyre. I layered all of these instruments to explore traditional Greek approaches to polyrhythm and metre.

Dion Spyropoulos - Mortal

‘Galvanic Birds,’ aims to grapple with our traditional sense of music being ‘tools of the trade’ and juxtapose it with contemporary forms of ‘experimentation’ and technological manipulation. For this piece, I multi-sampled a vibraphone and several bird sounds. While the vibraphone and strings have a conventional quality to them, the distortion of the bird sounds undercuts this and creates a heterogeneous ambient piece. While the piece pays reverence to traditional orchestral instruments it ultimately aims to demonstrate the array of music and textures we can create through technological advancements today.

Jade Then - Galvanic Birds

As a continuation of the new music tradition at the University of Melbourne, Nine Lives focuses around a multi-sampled lyre and the layering of musical cells to create minimalist style development. Acousmatic sound objects are used in part as a commentary on 21st century compositional practice. The work takes inspiration from legacy of Paul Fletcher’s string-based experimental music, that was created with the Shed-Post Kotolute featured in the multivocal exhibition. Additionally, Nine Lives incorporates electronic music sounds as historical deference to Keith Humble’s Society for the Private Performance of New Music.

Simon Zinzovski - Nine Lives

The Living Instruments Project is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music and the Grainger Museum at the University of Melbourne. Supported generously by a Melbourne Engagement Grant, this project multi-sampled the unique Grainger tuned percussion collection and explored ways these samples could then be turned into digital instruments - historically preserving the sound of the original instruments, but also investigating ways these sounds might be more widely accessed. 

The following playlist by Interactive Composition students at the University of Melbourne reflects this sampling and instrument building process, and importantly examines how contemporary makers are not just preservers of sound but creative agents. Using these digital sampled instruments, (and a little creative freedom!), this playlist represents a range of new works reflecting the sampling process and a sound world from our own time.

Living Instruments

Popular tracks