(Sharbaugh)
Michael Ash Sharbaugh [ https://soundcloud.com/michael-ash-sharbaugh ]: samples and recordings, sample and recording manipulation
Composed and Recorded ca. July 20, 2018.
sm5.
"'Akvo' (Esperanto for 'water') is an experimental musical work inspired by the words of Marc Weidenbaum: 'Record a piece of music in tribute to Terry Riley’s 'In C' using only samples of water sounds.' It took two-and-a-half hours to compose.
...
Water--still and silent in its natural, undisturbed state--requires gravity and an object or substrate to commingle with in order to unleash its signature sound; hence, all of My 'water samples' were the captured sounds of water interacting with an object [a concrete pavement, a two-gallon tin bucket, My rounded mouth], or along a substrate [a stream bed].
(Fortunately, it has been raining often for the last week in My southeastern-North American locale. I was able to depend on it to afford Me fresh sounds for this experimental, musical piece; rain arrived, yet again, today!)
The stream that runs behind My home provided Me the sampled fodder for the sustained, yet undulating, pad that appears early on in this one-minute and five-second piece. The stream sample, originally forty-seven seconds long, was time-expanded to about a minute's duration, and then 'juiced' of its harmonic content using various software plug-ins [various choruses].
Against that background, I inserted a sample of water droplets landing in a two-gallon tin bucket with about two inches of water already in it.
Then, I grabbed a bottle of filtered water from my refrigerator, took a generous swig, and captured My mouth making popping noises. I time-expanded the result, and ran it through a panning phaser plug-in.
A loud water droplet with an extremely 'hollow' sonic character provided Me with the base from which to synthesize the melodic notes for the arpeggio that appears twenty-eight seconds into the piece.
I timed all of the resultant rhythms and musical elements instinctually, albeit to coincide with sonic cues already present and suggested within the 'stream' and 'bucket' samples.
Three of the four tracks were all run through three instances of an identical reverb plug-in; each, however, were treated uniquely when it came to setting decay time, equalization, and pre-delay, as to suggest depth and positioning in the stereo field."
~ Michael Ash Sharbaugh
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"More on this 342nd weekly Disquiet Junto project ("In Sea" / The Assignment: Record a piece of music in tribute to Terry Riley’s In C using only samples of water sounds) at:
https://disquiet.com/0342/
More on the Disquiet Junto at:
https://disquiet.com/junto/
Subscribe to project announcements here:
http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/
Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:
https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0342-in-sea/ "
~ Marc Weidenbaum
