Esprit Flottant

This week I received the copies of the new release by Kaon. I composed the music based on the field recordings of Cedric Peyronnet. Recordings of the river Taurion. Good recordings, nice recordings. I really liked working with them. Today I relistened for the first time in a year to the composition. To my astonishment I was at first a bit taken aback by what I heard. It sounded alright but somehow the 'rhythm' or cadence of the work was not what I had expected. I played it a second time and then remembered how I conceived this composition as a circular work. It starts with the end and then works its way towards the end again. That way it feels alright if you replay it again and again. The second session was much better. I was adapted to the pace of the work and the coming and going of sounds and the transitions felt much better. Pheww!! So, I advise anyone to listen at least twice. Thanks to Cedric for making this production available.

please visit [ Kaon ].

Other than that, I have been working on several projects, as usual. I also have been preparing my live show in Cologne on June 9. More details will follow shortly.

I will also be present in a performance by the great Arturas Bumsteinas, who will do perform at the Kunstvlaai project in Amsterdam from May 16-21. It is called "My Own Private Bayreuth" which refers to both the state of Idaho and to composer Richard Wagner. I will be present there in the afternoon of May 20. Westergasfabriek Amsterdam. More info on this project at [ kunstvlaai ]. The site is a bit strange, but I guess more info will follow.

Read more...

Intermittent activities

There were quite a few things taking place at the same time last week. I have been working on an electronics and guitar works that was challenging but yielded "hurrays" from the original artist. I pulled an interesting trick by sidechaining the reverb on the guitar which worked out quite well. This is of course only possible when the original work is good. Unfortunately I have also encountered commissions where the original material was 'difficult' to say the least....

Next there was some final text work for my release in Kaon's [ Taurion series ]. I haven't heard the piece in more than a year so I am curious. Kaon (Cedric Peyronnet aka Toy Bizarre) is doing a wonderful series about this river and releases the works on a bi-monthly basis.

Please order the complete series!!

Then I received news about my work for [ Brombron ]. After more than three months I got an answer to a series of questions. Unfortunately I now have to dig deep into my memory to understand my own questions :)) So I will have to give this some more time.

There was a request for the mastering of a complete CD. This is quite a challenge as it consists of 10 songs (catchy tunes) which are quite different in sound quality as they have been recorded over a period of more than 3 years..... How am I going to bring it down to something coherent? Or should simple NOT make it into something coherent? Sometimes the answer is to do the opposite of what one aimed at first.

I have been preparing a new concert. Next Saturday I will be in [ Maastricht ] and on June 8 I will perform in Cologne (Koeln), Germany. These sets will be different from the earlier Extrapool concert. They will be twice as long and thus have more room for depth and detail.

Read more...

Dithering and noise shaping

Always by the end of a compositional project I am in doubt how to transfer all my material from 32 to 16bits. I understand that if I want to chop 16bits off my samples this will/may lead to 'damage'. This is what Reaper tells me to help making a choice: "In (very) brief, when you render from a higher bit depth to a lower one, you lose some resolution, and the lost resolution leaves low-level artifacts in the resulting signal. Dither is a way of blanketing the artifacts with more natural-sounding low-level hiss. Noise shaping is a way of filtering the artifacts into parts of the frequency spectrum that are harder for human ears to (psychoacoustically) perceive.

Some people think you should always dither when rendering to a lower fixed-point bit depth. Other people think that dither doesn't exist. The first people and the second people like to argue with each other. (*shrug*) There are lots of discussions out there on the internet about whether or not to dither and when to do it and why. This post isn't meant to do that -- it's just to explain technically what Reaper does if you click the buttons.

• The dither and noise shaping are independent (you can use either with or without the other).
  
• The dither is 1.5 bits which is somewhat on the light/do-no-harm side. With noise shaping off, the dither PDF is triangular; with noise shaping on, the dither is high-pass filtered.
  
• The noise shaping is a 9th order filter, which is similar to pow-R type 3.
  
• Unlike pow-R (or almost any other method), the noise shaping coefficients are calculated on the fly for any sample rate analytically, based on a very smooth equal loudness contour.
  
• The render dialog should only give you the option to dither when the target bit depth and format is appropriate. The calculation is done post-master-fader, so you don't need to do anything special except click the buttons.
• There are a few JS dither plugins included with Reaper. These are for technical use or backwards compatibility. You don't need to use them. Definitely don't use any dither plugin if you're using the native dither options when rendering.

The dither and noise shaping options in Reaper are of very high quality."

But I've decided to take a listen myself, before going ahead. I have rendered three different parts of the composition, each with a different setting (dither, noise shaping and D & NS combined). I mean, it's all about what you actually hear, isn't it? The Reaper people themselves are more rock-oriented, which makes things a little easier for them.

Read more...

Over to the final mix

Yesterday I went over to a first session of collating the various parts for K146. I got to a satisfactory structure quite quickly but of course the various connective parts needed adjustment.

Overhaul
I did a complete overhaul of one part. It's the part that precedes the part that I published a few days earlier. Initially it consisted of recordings of the river which I placed one after the other, while shortening the parts on the way. So for instance, the first block was 20 seconds, the second one 15 secs, then 10, 8, 5, etc. The end result would be a tension that collapsed and then falls apart in the next part (that I published on April 15, 2009). The result was not good enough, though.

New approach
I have split some 12 recordings into 9 slices (0-75hz, 75-150hz, etc) and used the slices to built up a new, imaginary river. The build up structure is again going with an increasing speed, so the tension also builds up. Because the material is more detailed it is also more flexible for my use and the new result is much better.

Next step is looking at the right volume balance, the crossovers of the several parts and taking care of phase problems (which I can handle quite well with a VST plug called[ Flux, Stereo Tool ]). Then finally a mixdown from 32bit to 16bit and we're done.

Next weekend the cat will be in the bag. Below is a snapshot of my Reaper mix session (click on it to enlarge). The part that is overhauled is the first 1 minute of "T.wav".

Read more...

Water run

Constructed a part that will precede the bird dissolves into water part (see post of February 20, 2009). It's rather noisy, I;m afraid. That's actually because I was skipping through all the sound files with recordings of fast moving water. The idea was to create my own noisily running water by mixing very short snippets of the originals. What I have now is 45 seconds consisting of 0.2 second samples of water, connected randomly (so there are in total 225 snippets, that's right).
The second stage was to construct a head and a tail to that piece. Well, I'll leave that in the dark for the moment, but here's the provisional result of my labourings of today (while recovering from my kidney ailings).

Listen to [ sample ].

Read more...

River works

I finally got to work in the studio again. It's been quite a busy time lately and making music came last in line. Today I worked mostly on the K146 project. I now have some five parts that I work on and which I will or will not glue together later on. I am contemplating whether I should just present them as tableaux vivants in separate parts. That would make sense since each of those five parts concentrates on one (or two) original recordings. One particular place that I worked today was Combe au Moulin.

The original water recording was edited with a ducking technique and then reverberated with the special DFX Transverb. Think of it like a tape loop with two independently-moving read heads. There are a lot of parameters that can be controlled and a parameter randomizer for the impatient. I was able to extract a cool ringing sound from it. After that a second movement focused on further layering that recording with harmonized subchords. It seemed to magically come together.

Below are three short samples of the mix:
First is a sample of the first rework of the original. I have used a noise gate to cut out all of the more silent parts and thus enhance the loud parts of the running water [ listen ]
Secondly I added the transverb into the mix [ listen ]
Thirdly you can hear the transition from the first section into the second part where I start working with harmonic layers of the original recording. [ listen ]


Another work started with the recording of a bird. This recording was at the Dognon. There's actually no water sound in this piece but I guess it was recorded somewhere on a slow streaming part a bit off the bank. The call of the bird was isolated and then repeated. After a while a heavily filtered version of a river recording shows up. Interestingly in the original recording it's most of all the water that you hear. In this filtered version you can hear cows mooing in the distance.. funny.

Listen to a provisional mix [ here ]

Read more...

The river sings

Yet another blorp: the thought that the river has its own voice, which concealed by the never ending spattering of water on the surface. But it's still there. When I do a spectral view on the recording at very fine grain then I can see that certain frequencies are stronger than others and that they are continuous. I made a filtering, leaving only those frequencies intact.

Listen [ here ]
and the original [ here ]

It's almost like singing, isn't it?

Read more...

Bird dissolves into water

Working on some ideas and samples and edits. And as I promised at the beginning of the year that I would come forward with more samples, here's a large one. The call of a bird is slowly granulated and then flows into the sound of the river Taurion.

[ Listen ]

Read more...

k146 started

Yesterday I spent most of the afternoon browsing through the hundreds of soundfiles that Cedric had sent me. I catalogued the files (loud and wild water vs. easy stream vs. no or hardly any water) and then re-listened to some of them.

I also tried some specific filtering (using a spectral interface) and running the files through compression settings. Some recordings are really beautiful (24 bit, stereo) and I'm tempted to use them in other compositions (but I won't, don't worry ;) ). It's your typical messing-around-with-the-material-fase.

Want to know more about the project ? click [ here ]

Read more...

k146 - preparing for new project

Today a DVD arrived with basic material for a new project. Well, new to me anyway. Cedric Peyronnet who also creates music as Toy Bizarre has been working on the project for a couple years already. Cedric has been recording the river Taurion for years and mapped his recording using Google Maps. Now the idea is that, in order to complete the enterprise, other composers create a sound work using the basic recording material. You can read all about Cedric's project at [ this project site ].

I have a few ideas about what I wil do but it's all rather conceptual. One of the ideas is to filter each recording using the map coordinates. But that will certain not be all. Maybe it's a nice starting point. The real work still has to start.

Read more...