Sampled Sound Compositions use sounds that were recorded (sampled) from real-life objects at hand. These are played back via a type of synthesizer called a "MIDI Sampler," which allows the sampled audio to be manipulated in a great variety of ways, including:
In addition to the capabilities within the MIDI Sampler, there are additional mixing and processing capabilities within the studio that allow the audio samples to be further altered.
Here are descriptions of the music listed below.
Dreams of Sound was created as part of a demonstration about sound and acoustics I did for students in the Science Seminar club at P.S. 110, The Florence Nightingale School, in Manhattan. I brought a portable Digidesign Pro Tools setup and recorded sounds made by the fifth-graders, which included percussion sounds, animal sounds and spoken words. I was able to import these samples into Reason, where they were edited and used to compose the piece you hear here.
Dreams of Sound
For a project in my MTEC-315 Electronic Music Synthesis course, I have the class come up with as many sounds as they can from a limited pallette of found objects. My class and I took a portable Pro Tools setup around campus and looked for metal objects that could be struck and recorded. From this class, we ended with eighty samples of items such as air conditioning ducts, stairway railings, pipes, slamming metal doors, trashcan lids and so forth.
I Love a. Afarensis is one of several pieces I created using this particular set of samples. I envisioned this as a sort of percussion ensemble piece with four sections: a Latin percussion section, a Brazilian Samba section, a Whacky Bell section and a Xylophone section. Each section gets its own feature. For the musical climax at the end of the piece, the four sections are brought together at the same time.
Robot Buttons is another example created from the same metallic sample set.
I Love a. Afarensis
Robot Buttons
Coney Island (working title "Tabla") is a piece created entirely from sounds sampled from a Coney Island Lager beer bottle!
Another example from the MTEC-315 Electronic Music Synthesis sampling project, this time the class had to come up with as many sounds as they can from a single beer bottle. To do this, we hit the bottle with sticks and stones and other objects. We put objects, such as thumbtacks and paperclips, inside the bottle and swirled them around. We blew air into the bottle. We even rolled the bottle across the table. From these sounds, the class created a sample library from wihich to compose. In the assignment, only samples from this bottle could be used, so it forces the student to exploit the sounds they have, and to think creatively as to how sounds can be manipulated to function within their composition in ways similar to the way that conventional instruments function in a piece of music.
I usually break the ice with my students with a demonstration of what can be done using only the sampled sounds. Coney Island is my demo.
Coney Island
(
11.4 MB
)
Please wait...