It's been a while

I have been rather negligent over the past week and have not submitted much in the way of blog. From today I am getting back into the habit! My excuse is that there is a deadline tomorrow which I have been slaving towards!

The work in for tomorrow is the electroacoustic soundtrack. I found this a rather daunting task from the outset as I have never actively pursued this area of composition; I would even go as far to say that I have actively avoided it. However, I feel that the way Roberto approached the module and taught us the background and the various styles involved in electroacoustic music was very inspiring. I have, to my surprise, found this assignment actually quite enjoyable and I hope the quality of my work reflects this.

I described in a previous post how I borrowed a portable recorder from a classmate and recorded various sounds for the soundtrack. I have since manipulated these sounds in all manner of ways to create a spooky and altogether atypical score. I really mean it when I say that a door has been opened to me and I shall always consider the use of electroacoustic music in future when approaching a new project.

Just some of the effects I used are:
-sampling
-pitch shifting
-reversing
-delay/reverb/echo
-distortion/feedback
-time shifting
-EQ/compression/gating

I have experimented with the majority of these effects in the past already but never quite grasped the mechanisms behind them or their full potential. I feel I have come out of this project with some added ammunition to my arsenal of music-creating material.

It was also rather fun creating the DVD. I have never made a DVD before so using the software was entirely new to me. Unfortunately I appear not to have iDVD on my mac so Sam's (my girlfriend) dad showed me how to use a program that he uses on windows. It worked like a charm and I created a spooky title menu and even composed 30 seconds of music to play in the background. I also purchased some DVD labels and a case to really enhance the professionalism of my work. Designing the labels and the case cover was also fun and the finished result does look rather spectacular if I do say so myself!

There were a few slight issues with the DVD that I had to overcome; firstly, somewhere on its journey from Logic to DVD parts of the soundtrack had distorted. This obviously would not do so I had to go back into Logic and reduce the levels to compensate for the conversion issue. This was then sorted BUT now a couple of the sounds' reverb tail was delayed resulting in a dead sound followed by a second's silence then a sudden reverberation. This now had to be sorted out. Finally everything was perfect and the finished result is as good as I could have hoped for.

Hand-in is tomorrow, fingers crossed there are no more unseen hiccups before then!