Musical Concrete

This album consists of a series of short pieces composed in the style of Pierre Schaeffer’s Musique Concrète. These pieces were written as compositional exercises while studying studio composition at the University of Birmingham. They were composed individually, but I’ve decided to include combine them here as an album, since the thematic material is fairly similar. The title of the album is an obvious play on words on the style the pieces are written in.

What is Musique Concrète?

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Musique Concrète is a style of music that involves recording everyday sounds, and abstracting their origins, so that the listener can’t tell what source the sounds come from. There’s a heavy focus on the raw material of sound, and on manipulating sound in inovative ways, less on traditional melodic material.

Each piece in the album focuses on an everyday object or material, which I recorded in a studio setting and manipulated into the compositions using REAPER DAW and various plugins from GRM.

Alongside learning how to use REAPER to manipulate sound, the studio composition module at UoB involved a considerable amount of listening work. Each week we would listen to a variety of compositions from other composers in the field, and write our thoughts in a reflective listening journal. I’ve included those thoughts here.

Reflective Listening Journal

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I find the concept of manipulating a sound beyond its original natural shape fascinating, especially the idea of extending the resonance of a sound long past its natural decay. The notion of creating impossible sounds has been very influential in my compositional journey, as I have strived to create contrast between the “real” and the impossible, by manipulating recognisable sounds to no longer conform to their physical limitations.

Dirk Stromberg Rising Tones

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Dirk Stromberg’s Rising Tones is a piece composed using source sounds emitted by radio telescopes. Stromberg focuses mainly on rising pectral tonal material throughout the piece, creating a sound that can seemingly rise infinitely. This pitched material acts as a drone which gradually oscillates by varying the rate at which it pans left and right, coming in and out of phase with itself. About halfway through the piece, a bass frequency which behaves like a shepherd tone is introduced, always rising, but never reaching the top. This tone eventually settles, as a new textural material of granulized, shimmering bells takes over the rising pitch. The piece gradually fades out at the end, implying that these tones continue to rise beyond the scope of human hearing.

I really like the way Stromberg uses an abstract sound and manipulates it to become impossible by the laws of physics, never reaching a peak, while still keeping a sense of familiarity by obeying the limitations of human hearing.

Michael Pisaro Still Life with Cicadas

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An album that plays around with our sense of hearing is Michael Pisaro’s Still Life with Cicadas, Waterfall and Radu, which consists of field recordings of natural sounds such from cicadas, and silence. I appreciate how Pisaro combines simple sounds to create a complex texture that can paint a vivid picture in the mind. It is also interesting how he creates such an unnatural space by the sounds’ movement.

The 2nd track of the album begins with the sound of just one cicada, with none of the background noise one would normally associate with them. The cicada’s sound periodically cuts to complete silence, returning in a different location, an effect which acts like the insect is teleporting to different positions in a vacuum. About 1.30 a tinnitus-like hum is introduced, which creates the impression that the silence has become too much to bear and now the brain is filling in the perceived missing noise. This is further emphasized when at about 2.30 the sound of rushing water is introduced.

The picture builds, with hums, cicadas, crickets, running water and traffic all painting an image of what silence might sound like to an ear that fills in the void of sound with repetitive background noise. This material gets all layered together at 4.30 to create a collage of background noise which grows to become unbearable due to its deafening volume, and conflicting harsh frequencies. At 6.00 a resonant electronic sound is added as a more “musical” element, acting as some kind of background drone, like the electrical hum of a ground loop, creating some kind of underlying bass element to the more recognisable natural sounds.

Francis Dhomont Forêt Profunde

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Francis Dhomont’s work Forêt Profunde has also been quite influential to my compositional process, especially the movements Chambre interdite and Musique de chambre.

Chambre interdite or Forbidden Room is aptly named for its use of door sounds. It opens with a very close, dry, opening door, which then suddenly cuts to an frozen abstraction of the sound, creating a lovely contrast between the recognisable sound of a door, and its manipulated clone. Dhomont uses a lot of freeze, reverb and stretch FX in this movement, as a way of creating impossible spaces. While Still Life focuses on impossible movements of sound, Dhomont creates unnatural spatial atmospheres.

At 0.47 there’s an interesting transition between spaces, as a creaky door with a lot of reverb sharply cuts to a completely different atmosphere which sounds like some roomy far away location. Dhomont emphasizes the contrast between these spaces by these quick, unnatural cuts, an effect I have found to be inspirational in my own work.

Musique de chambre or Chamber Music uses instrumental sounds as a basis, with a dissonant and busy texture of pizzicato strings creating a chaotic atmosphere throughout the movement. Instead of disarraying the strings by the use of FX, he uses a chaotic arrangement of the material itself to abstract its sound, so it is difficult to tell which instruments are playing what.

Out of this chaos emerges a peaceful piano solo, as a moment of calm in a storm. This material is parodied at the end of the movement by a detuned piano, which is layered with an extreme delay, causing it to quickly devolve into a chaotic texture similar to the initial pizz strings.

Having found this contrast between the peaceful, unedited melodies, and the chaotic textures to be quite satisfying, I have attempted to subtly enrich my own compositions in a similar way.

Monty Adkins Five Panels no. 1 To Luke

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Five Panels no. 1 to Luke by Monty Adkins has also been a huge inspiration for my compositional process. The piece contrasts complex granulated textures with the pure clean tones of guitar harmonics in a simple melody. Five Panels is a fantastic example of Adkins’ compositional style of balancing timbre, tone and texture. Each piece focuses heavily on rich and soft resonant material with underlying granulated textures that keep the slow-moving tonal material interesting. No. 1 was especially inspirational to me because of the way the natural guitar harmonics gradually become more abstracted over the course of the piece, with the reverberating tails of the notes extended to create a wash of sound.

I love the way the initial background texture gradually increases in layers and overtakes the harmonics, while in contrast the harmonics swap roles and replace the granulated material as a background texture. I also like how Adkins maintains the underlying calm of the opening harmonics throughout the piece, in spite of the increase in agitation in the textural material. Gradually, this agitated texture that has taken the forefront diminishes, leaving a long, pure, harmonic that is reminiscent of the opening purity of the piece.

Monty Adkins Memory Etching

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This piece uses a lot of long sonorous textures, with bell-like sounds creating interesting gestural elements that emerge out of these textures. There’s a variety of sound sources, such as wind chimes, music boxes and rattling glass objects, but these get obfuscated over the course of the piece.

Adkins creates interesting, randomised, rhythmical elements, which I suspect is achieved by freezing and shuffling the tails of some of the sound sources. He also does a really good job exploring the full frequency range.

Monty Adkins Memory Box

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Created with mostly music box sounds, this piece has a very nostalgic atmosphere to it. There’s an underlying texture, as of someone turning the music box, which has a lot of reverb on it to extend the decay of the bells. As the piece progresses, more abstracted/edited elements are added to the piece, defocusing the original music box.

Monty Adkins Forensic Embers

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This piece has a more ominous atmosphere. It explores bass tones, with some ethereal string like sounds over the top. There, long held tones are accompanied by more granular textural sounds, which add some attack to otherwise fairly static textures. An organ is added about half-way through the piece, to tie the various timbres together, and create some harmony.

Monty Adkins Radiant Moon

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This piece is similar to Memory Box, in that it focuses on the bell like qualities of a music box, but Adkins makes liberal use of vinyl player noise and static, which creates a lovely crunchy texture, with a retro feel.

Arvo Pärt Für Alina

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This isn’t a piece of electro acoustic music, but it really fits the style of music I’m inspired by for my compositions. It explores the timbral elements of the piano, playing with its bell-like sound qualities. Pärt uses the sustain pedal to create a wash of texture by the overtones that come through when holding the pedal down, which I think is a really interesting and underused technique.

Monty Adkins Clockwork Cities

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This piece makes use of freeze a lot, freezing the decaying notes of a guitar to create textural elements, accompanied by the occasional attack of the beginning of a new note in typical Adkins style. For some of his material he clearly doesn’t try to hide the loop point so that it creates a rhythmical element. He also shuffles various sound elements around to create movement by increasing the chaotic nature of the textures. There’s an interesting use of taps, and various string sounds, which are obfuscated by layering them in such a way that they seem to be mechanical, like the insides of a clock working.