A performance of my Ambient Piece; Echoes of Eno and the Audiophonic Tape Orchestra, which took place on October the 17th 2020 at Superordinary, a studio art space in the Brisbane CBD. This was the final concert of my Music Technology degree, a capstone concert which aimed to summarise and revaluate my learning from across a range of experiences from my time at the Griffith University Queensland Conservatorium of Music (QCGU).
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PROGRAM NOTES:
Using VCV Rack generated soundscapes, manipulation and processing, and sonically shifting tape loops, I aimed to create and explore a Brian Eno inspired ambient world (created by blending a variety of ambient patches and textural content all created with VCV Rack), and supported by interweaving and striking Touch Designer visuals. These ambiences provide different grains and tones and are aided by complex manifestation of noise generation and manipulation along with a variety of modulating spatial textures. They are processed with delays and reverbs, creating a large space in which to fill with dense melodic timbres and tonalities to achieve a very thick wall of sound.
Adrian Moore explains in Sonic Art: An introduction to electroacoustic music composition that electroacoustic can be thought of in terms of shape, form, emotion and energy. Drawing on this, I aimed to, as Moore describes, ‘shape sound in time’. As this piece is timbrally and texturally focused, I aimed to show how a simple yet musically enigmatic work can enrapture an audience's attention through the changing, merging and interweaving of timbres and textures, blending and mixing together into a musical synergy.
I used two tape machines with two sonically different tape loops running on each, which created a sound bed by playing little bits of harmonic and melodic information, indefinitely looped and helping to add sonic interest to the performance. Additionally, I also introduced the main melodic content with my guitar, processed through a variety of effects in VCV Rack and Ableton, including a plethora of reverb and granular synthesis modules offering a wide range of sonic possibilities.
The visual component of this live performance was designed in TouchDesigner and controlled using a Behringer BCR2000. As a nod to Brian Eno’s Ambient Album covers featuring USGS topographic maps, they were created by collecting over 80 overhead photographs of the Earth as featured on Google Maps, which blend together and morph into one another using a variant of the Ganbreeder AI, which was trained to recognise similarities between each photograph through pixel blending and distortion. This was similarly repeated with pictures of landscape photographs, with all other visual content purely TD-generated, including watercolour and oil spill pattern-inspired audio-reactive patches.
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