Sound Design and Music

Sound Design for High Strung Trailer

High Strung Promotional Trailer
I did the sound design for this trailer of the stop motion animation short film High Strung by my friend Tommy Thompson.

A Soundtrack for Your Ears of Wind and Rain

One day, it was stormy and I made a song.

Hybrid Music 2006 – Spring Quarter Final Project (see also the music video)

My Spring Hybrid project consisted primarily of aimless sample gathering and aimless learning of various software and hardware. It wasn’t until 8 weeks into the quarter that I actually was able to decide what exactly I was going to do. I decided that I would use the Renoise software, which happens to be a modernized version of archaic Tracker technology. I was quite pleased with the ability to program beats entirely with the keyboard instead of using difficult and carpel-tunnel inducing midi-programming techniques. Instead of using the somewhat standard “create a beat and loop it for the entire song”, the song is instead constructed out of almost entirely rhythmic material, not looping, but constructed in a way that continuously changes over the course of the song, in a micro-structure way rather than a macro-structure way. The result is interesting, but something that deserves a bit more refinement work.

Hybrid Music 2007 – Winter Quarter Final Project

My Winter Quarter final project “In the Darkness of the Pantry” is by far my favorite electronic music project that I have composed. The structure of it is built on a cluster of guitar riffs that I wrote back when I was 17 or so, at which time I was heavily into creating riffs of picked guitar patterns that were in 9/8 or 7/8, but maintained a 4/4 feel, so that every repetition they alternated rhythmic emphasis. My goal for this project was to somehow synthesize the loads of Dark Ambient music that I had been listening to recently with my tendency for the creation of complex beat structures.

The assignment that this project was created under was the use vocal material and lyrical content within the structure of an electroacoustic piece of music. My attempts to integrate ‘sung’ vocal material went somewhat less than well, and myself running out of time, I opted to instead use vocal samples from the computer game Blood by Monolith software, which we shall say played a large part in the formative years of my childhood. Using these samples and some tasteful readings of excerpts from the Necronomicon, I managed to construct a quite auditorily pleasing musical experience. This song also represents a growing understanding of utilizing techniques of compression, equalization, reverb, and other tricks of the mixing trade to create a lush and pleasant mix.

in the darkness of the pantry
my toes laid eyes on a rusty nail
crying to myself a sky shanty
i said ‘martyr, i didn’t see you there’
“I have a present for you”
in sparkly darkness the downpour continued
rivulets down the drain of mud and grass
assist the diseased into the shelter room
exploding love, the crowd cried with laughter
force their mouths wider still
vegetable broth concubine
pinkies raised, sipping blood tea
snickering in silence at sodomy
in the mulch of the ocean floor
not things above knew those below
destruerebam

Hybrid Music 2007 – Winter Quarter Midterm Project

My mid-quarter Winter 2007 project was a product of a hurried and stressful schedule, myself “running around all crazy” doing SOS Media and being distracted by The Trouble With Unicorns. The first section is a generative random patch on the Buchla 200e analog modular synthesizer, utilizing the aleatoric sequencer step-jumping capabilities of the “dual arbitrary random function generator.” (I think that is what it was called). This somewhat chaotic structure of sound transitions into a highly organized and rhythmic 4 beats per bar pattern created using the beat-splicing functionality of Kontakt, acting upon samples of my electric guitar, and affected with some various VST plugins including Fire. After a little while I switch it up a bit by removing an 8th note every other bar or something like that, just to keep things interesting. (?) This project was also created in Ableton Live, which I had been learning a lot more about (after my initial experience creating the soundtrack for my Mediaworks final project in it) in the preceding few weeks.

Hybrid Music 2006 – Fall Quarter Final Project

For my final fall project, I spent a large amount of time working through video tutorials of how to use Digital Performer, and learned more about it than most other kids in my class were aware of. Utilizing the beat-remapping features of DP, I synched tempos with a sequence that I recorded from the Buchla 200, and utilized a Software Sampling plugin called Native Instruments Kontakt, which I had learned the previous Spring doing my final project for Mediaworks, to create a beat-structure. This project explores my interest in colliding rhythms of different metric patterns and playing them off each other, creating structures that are rhythmically “Dancy” and fun to listen to, and yet are synchopated, polyrhythmic, and quite complex. This project also represents an early ‘signpost’ in my acquisition of knowledge regarding the theory of electronic sound synthesis, but unfortunately is plagued with a somewhat disasterous lack of finesse in regard to acceptable mixing, and structuring musical transitions.

Hybrid Music 2006 – Fall Quarter Midterm Project

My first electronic music project in Hybrid Music was fraught with a great deal of distress and frustration. Digital Performer was a digital audio workstation software that I had no experience with, and as it was expected that people in Hybrid Music had already learned it, I was at somewhat at of a disadvantage with other students in the class. The Mac user interface was also something that I had had little experience with. In usual technologically masochistic Jed-fashion, I elected to work at home to arrange this project in DP (the sound sources were all from the Buchla 200 and 200e analog modular synthesizers). Of course I didn’t have a mac at home, and so in order to run Digital Performer, I had to install OSx86 10.4 on my 2.6Ghz Pentium computer with a gig of ram. I managed to get it working, however experienced a plethora of problems storing DP projects on my external FAT32 harddrive.