[editors notes: this was written a few days back, at an earlier stage in the production.. since then things have changed pretty dramatically.. but the ideas contained here are still front and center.. as far as the music production / musical composition’s core organizational principles are concerned… The other note to note.. is this is but part 1..  stay tuned for the second half] 

Ok.. the last post I actually posted was what we call in the social media biz “supper duper” long… which is strategically a no-no.. but I felt that I needed it for a kind of aesthetic / philosophical / theoretical back drop for todays post.. which…. though I didn’t get around to saying all I’d have liked to in said post.. we are going to try and move our focus onto the actual work before me.. and the processes involved.

As I started to say in the last post.. I started off with a voice synthesizer.. a free one.. plugged lyrics into that.. it renders out to an MP3 (not totally ideal), from there I take the MP3 into Ableton Live and start running it through all manner of effects.. I do this individual for each line of lyrics.. rendering out a few variations for each line..

It’s at this point where the project goes on the back burner.. my attention devoted to other matters.. until I go out and buy ReCycle.. where I cut up the processed audio files into REX2 loops for use in Reason… which brings us to where I am today.

You can sequence a REX2 file… play any of the slices in the loop, at any time, in whatever order.. also the REX player in Reason, known as Dr:rex, is a bit of an instrument.. it has pitch bend, a modulation wheel.. you can automate any of its controls.. we have filters, oscillators, and modulators.

For this project, which is my first project along these lines.. I start off fairly simple.. I sit in the sequencer, sequencing the loop slices…

REX sequencing

Imagine.. if you will.. we have an audio file with various slices. In our sequencer we say what slice to play, and how loud to play that slice.. as well as when to play that slice. The slices.. if played in order.. for the right lengths.. would play the original audio file as it was.. assuming your project is set to the same tempo.. But in programming a sequence, we don’t actually have to play the slices in order or anything.

The effect is to “cut up” the audio file.. which.. in practice.. creates some pretty strange glitch-e kinda of effects.. sounds like digital equipment going nuts… sometimes you’re sure there’s something wrong with it, and you want to smack the computer.

This cut up / glitch-ification of the audio introduces a range of ambiguity.. we are abstracting from a source.. this having to with the meta cognitive experience of experience I talked about in that recent post.. Mind you our starting point is a voice synthesizer which sounds a bit like a speak and spell.. or I should say it has all the rich expressiveness of a speak and spell.. which is to say its not expressive at all.. it is digitized.. so.. whatever the lyrics are.. they are now abstracted into this digitized place.

Thematic Material

There is, of course, a link between the digital / mechanical and the pathological.. what’s the relationship of the machine to the humanity? What is the symbolic meaning of Darth Vader being more machine then human? Hitler… he would have told you that “he was the state,” the state of course is the machine.. such is the symbolism we are playing with.

The lyrics have to do with the transcendent.. and the limits of our concepts of reality.. through which we interact with reality.. and the implications of this.. God.. if you look at how he behaved relative to Job, or for that matter in the old testament more generally.. would seem to be “a bit of a monster” or.. to put it another way.. human morality and God’s morality are not quite the same thing.. we could talk about awe in relationship to God in this sense.. and the relationship between man and machine.. perhaps the pathological with the.. kind of conventional human morality.. has certain parallels.. which has some implication on how we might relate to the lyrics.

All of this has to do with with the mind bending aspect of the lyrics.. has to do with.. “the dark side of the transcendent,” to put it a certain way.. but also we are dealing with the old “through death comes life” shtick.

Ambiguity and the Cognitive

In the blog entry to which this is a kind of sequel.. I shared a cut up film written by William Burroughs.. We are of course entering into the world of cut ups.. and we are talking about mysticism’s relationship to challenges in cognitive processes.. or I talked a bit about this in said post… So lets talk about this a little.

We have the range of the easy to understand to the.. incomprehensible.. the overly easy is boring.. the overly hard to understand is frustrating.. and so it is that we dance between the extremes..

So.. how do we do this? For starters.. if I were to speak to you a sentence.. but allowed 5 minutes to pass between each word.. would you, at the end of it, know what the hell I was saying? Probably not.. particularly if there was music all around, drawing our attention this way and that.

This idea.. and I don’t even know if it is still up at this point.. is a driving idea of the lyrics in the music linked to from this post. It’ll be up in a podcast soon enough.. In any event.. lets talk about the lyrics in this “MTFS revisited” track.

We are taking one line from the lyrics to the song I’m currently working on… and that was the basis for the lyrics in the MTFS revisited track. Your ability to recognize what is being said in the lyrics is played with in a number of ways.

Firstly.. we hear the lyrics more or less straight.. slightly manipulated, close to the start of the track.. there’s only one problem.. there’s a lot of frequency masking going on.. so the lyrics are not easily recognized at this point.. we most likely only recognize fragments of the lyrics.. if that.. if we even recognize the lyrics at all. (There was one person who commented that she didn’t even notice the singing till she had heard the track a few times!)

The whole way through the track.. it is never made clear what the lyrics are saying.. its always obscured.. or we are always only getting fragments.. until the very end.. when the lyrics show up like a period.

Now.. if you know the lyrics, and you listen, you know what is being said even when the lyrics are being obscured in one way or another.. and at this point the lyrics provide a kind of subtext / meaning to the music.

Ok.. so back to the current project

There is this idea that.. well what would happen to the MTFS Revisited.. if you heard the project I’m working on now? Another words.. if you got the rest of the song of which that is a line from? How would it change the meaning of that track.. and for that matter, how might that track change the meaning of this track?

As I play around with this question.. I think “hmm, perhaps I should make a whole album based of this idea.” Which leads us into the question of lyrics in a slightly different way.

The Issue of the Vocal / Lyric Performance Spectrum

A little earlier I spoke about what it means to have lyrics realized by a software synthesizer with all the expressive powers of a speak and spell.. Those limitations have some implications on the meaning.. and my cut up project with it, along with all the processing.. is at least in part a compensation for those limitations..

Well.. there are other options that I.. alluded to in the recent post.. about how it would cost me a few grand to get the tools necessary to fully explore this spectrum.. which is why the full project may spend some time on the back burner.. but lets explore the tools anyway:

Tools

• Cantor: This is a real, full fledged “vocal synthesizer” which is to say its made to allow you to produce vocals via a synthesizer.. It’s even capable of going so far as to “sound realistic.” Imagine that….. Its selling for around $300 these days.. less for an older version.
• Antares AVOX: This is your basic “vocal tool box;” a set of tools made expressly for processing vocals.. you can do your gender bending.. you can change.. basically… well.. make it sound as if it were someone else singing.. Its some very cool and very powerful tools.. we’re talking $500.
• Audio Ease All In One Bundle: For our purposes we are talking about SpeakerPhone.. SpeakerPhone is a kind of.. lets call it a sound design tool.. which is primarily focused on emulating different types of speakers.. everything from telephones to.. well speak and spell esk devices.. to guitar cabinets.. and onward.. via the magic that is dynamic convolution technology… the full bundle, of which SpeakerPhone is a part.. runs in at a cool $1200.

Out side of the above mentioned gear… there’s things like “good quality microphones” and what not. I’m thinking both studio microphones and field microphones..

And um, what Exactly is all this about?

Strangely.. the way my current process is working.. the lyrics are rendered in a rather ambient form.. They are a strange element of an electronic sound art thing.. It’s hard to really explain this without hearing it.. The way the voice synth’s lines are both processed and then chopped up.. and sequenced.. make it so that the very act of.. “it” trying to speak a line.. is sorta fascinating to listen to.. To the point that.. we loose track of what’s actually being said.. It’s as if the vocals where some kind of “sound effect” or special thing sorta put there..

So.. this is an effect of how I’ve explored this crazy cut up ish process at this point.. the point is that.. you could very easily have “real singing” going on.. at the same time in a track.. without the two elements interfering with one another. I suppose to fully explain this we need to jump back to…

Ambiguity and the Cognative

In cutting stuff up.. one of the things I’m playing with is.. how do we process the words? We process the words differently then how we process pure sound.. how can cutting things up be expressive? What are the possibilities of working with lyrics in this way?

Methods of am-big-u-fying.

• Temporal orientation.. particularly spacing.. if we are speaking linearly. How long are the gaps between stuff?
• Temporal orientation.. order / sequencing: How things are placed in time relative to one another.. who we move through the slices..
• “The Mix:” In our virtual mix.. how front and center is an element.. how far away is it?

Latter: (lets get back to basic process already)

Performances, programing, and arranging

So far the process has a couple of steps.. Once you’ve loaded your REX file into Dr:REX.. you’re going to create little sequences out of it. This is your chance to “sculpt a vocal performance” in a rather glitch-ified way. The other sorta sequence I’ll make is a kind of rhythmic textural arrangement of the slices. I may, in the process, make variations of these….. I then arrange the sequences in relationship to one another on the time line…

So far, this is all I do.. I mean I do this for each clip.. till I get through all the clips.. I don’t even bother automating pitch bends, modulations, tuning, or whatever.. I do, however, listen to the stuff and think about what I might do in the next stage of things..

Next Steps

The next step is still something of an unknown to me… This is an exploratory adventure, and what I plan to do next is nothing more then ideas / presumptions.. Once we actually dig into it.. then we’ll really know.

The considerations

One of the problems I have is that the vocals happen inside a very limited frequency range.. and we really want to be careful about how other instrumentation will impact your ability to hear what’s being said. This kind of a thing is also an issue relative to the interest in the rhythmic textural arrangements.

The actual lyrics, and there meaning, is.. well its very deep.. and how the lyrics can presented / performed / arranged or executed, is going to effect how you take them in. Currently.. the way stuff is arranged is very much on the… well it makes it so we sorta experience one line at a time and loose the continuity of between the lines. So one assumes that we need variations in the performance and arrangement.. so that this way of making things more ambiguous will.. at some point in the production.. come into focus… so that the meanings of the lyrics have there proper impact.

To these ends.. I have a number of thoughts and ideas.. which is part of what makes it interesting to me. If, as I’ve suggested before.. the notion is to make a whole album out of these lyrics.. or that these lyrics would become the core of the album.. if we think of the album as one giant composition.. then it could be that we have different variations at different times over the course of the album.

This idea then.. could mean that the album is essentially a kind of instrumental album.. with ambient vocal textures.. to put it a certain way. This, as an idea, seems very interesting to me.. and makes sense, I think, as a possible first step in bringing lyrics to my music.

If you relate the idea of this.. to what I was getting to before.. about a “Vocal Lyric Spectrum,” its possible that you could have other elements that could provide “alternative organizing principles” for the album.. or that you could hear the album in different ways.. or from different perspectives. Not having all the tools I’d like.. a certain amount of this larger project is forced to be on the back burner.. at least for now..

so, back to the next steps

One of the interesting compositional challenges is the cut up issue of how we read the lyrics, so to speak.. I assume that one of the next steps is to start actually mixing the vocal performance. This will amount to putting effects on them.. and automating there arrangement in space.. It also might be altering parts pitches so that they work inside of an over all composition..

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 28th, 2008 at 6:53 am and is filed under Music Production, Reason and ReCycle, The New Project, musical composition, philosophy, psychology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.