Sound For New Media

I was not in class last week, so I am not sure as to what was settled on in class, but from my understanding of the class previous to last weeks, we want to create an environment using lighting, environmental sounds, and MIDI stations and possibly guitars to trigger those things.  The system we will be using is 4 AV40 speakers as it surrounds in between stations on stands at average ear height, 2 stereo speakers for the drone 1 station, 2 
Yamaha Loudspeakers 15” w/ horn (stands opt.) best for bass, and 1 40-50W guitar amp for the pedalboard FX station 3.  We have different people recording effects for each environment.  From my understanding people will come and go to a station that controls a particular environment.  Each environment will control the next but still keeping it’s individuality within the performance.  Each station will trigger a particular aspect within the environment that is being created by the performance as a whole.

I am going to talk about the Electronic Saxophone vs. a typical woodwind Sax.  I play the saxophone and absolutely LOVE the instrument.  I played a typical Alto Saxophone and have tried an electronic and the feel is A LOT different. There is nothing like the feel of a typical sax.  The weight, the way it plays in your hands, and the feel of an electronic sax takes that away.  It just doesn’t feel as natural.  All the quirks and natural sounds of a sax are gone also, the electronic sax can sound TOO perfect and can take the character and personality of a typical sax away.  However, there ARE some positive things about the electronic Sax.  Like a guitar, you can run process the sound of the sax with all kinds of effects like reverb, delay, tremelo, etc.  I once did a live sound gig for a guy that used an electronic sax in his performance and the performance part of the show with the sax was definitely better then it would have been with a normal saxophone.  It came with all kinds of presets and really gave the show something different.  Do I think playing an electronic sax over a typical one to play jazz make it something other then jazz? no.  Because the concept of the music remains the same, but the feel and natural sounds of a typical sax can never be duplicated.

I think this could be considered music.  I feel like there are some structured drum patterns and ambient sounds in the piece.  I definitely feel like this piece is more composed and experimental then it is improvised.  Based on the name and the type of instrumentation, I feel like the culture this music is being based on is the Asian culture.  The music is definitely more percussive with a lot of drums and impact type instruments, but I also heard some flutes and some synth type ambient sounds.  I think this can be appealing to any type of audience especially if it is coupled with a performance on stage.  This has an eery feeling and I feel can definitely be used in a horror film.

The Gallery was awesome! It was exactly what you would expect from a school like this. The creativity, time and effort that everyone put into the projects made it a lot of fun. I wish there would have been more people to come and check out the work we did, but it was still a lot of fun to see what people came up with. My favorite besides my own groups project was the Make It Rain project. I liked the fact that it wasn’t anything digital and that it was buil and had a great effect.

Trevor Henthorn
AU3431
April 22, 2012

                                                      Project Proposal

We are proposing to do a project that splits frequencies (20Hz-600Hz, 600Hz-1kHz, 1kHz-9kHz, 9kHz- ) four ways through four speakers corresponding to each set of frequencies.  We would trigger the frequencies using vocals In Logic.  The way we would divide the frequencies would be to place a gate and an EQ on each track to filter out the corresponding frequencies allowing for the vocal to pass through particular speakers depending on the frequencies the voice outputs.  We will also be putting different vocal effects on each track to give each track and set of frequencies a unique quality.