Detuning The Nation
Since lockdown, walking the streets near where I live I have had the constantly noticing how everything is becoming 'out of tune'. It is obviously true when talking about musical instruments which need a tuner to visit to maintain their pitch and tuners have not been able to gain access due to the lockdown restrictions, but I have also noticed church bells and town hall chimes slowly de-tune during this time.
Normally, when I walk to church on a Sunday to perform by job as a church organist I hear the clear bells from the clock tower of the church at the top of the hill on the street where I live and, as I continue on, those bells recede into the distance and half-way through my journey I hear the chimes of the Town Hall clock chime the quarter hour (telling me I'm on time to turn up for work). I can always tell if I'm running late since the church bells (to my right are still too loud), and the Town Hall chimes are too distant.
Since lockdown, walking the streets near where I live I have had the constantly noticing how everything is becoming 'out of tune'. It is obviously true when talking about musical instruments which need a tuner to visit to maintain their pitch and tuners have not been able to gain access due to the lockdown restrictions, but I have also noticed church bells and town hall chimes slowly de-tune during this time.
Normally, when I walk to church on a Sunday to perform by job as a church organist I hear the clear bells from the clock tower of the church at the top of the hill on the street where I live and, as I continue on, those bells recede into the distance and half-way through my journey I hear the chimes of the Town Hall clock chime the quarter hour (telling me I'm on time to turn up for work). I can always tell if I'm running late since the church bells (to my right are still too loud), and the Town Hall chimes are too distant.
I bought a pair of Roland CS-10EM binaural headphones to be able to capture this sound of bells at a certain point in my walk to work every Sunday.
I went on my first sound walk and captured the sound of church bells in one ear and Town Hall bells in the other. When playing back on my PC speakers I couldn't hear what I heard while I walked, but when listening with headphones I can. Below is a recoding of that four minute walk where one bell can be heard throughout and then the two bell sounds can be heard towards the end.
Since lockdown began it's forced me to think about 'performance spaces' in a totally different way. Since these spaces are known to me through them having physical bodies of people in them either rehearsing or performing music or being the audience for live music I've begun to see these spaces are where individuals can create or play music. I also focused on what sounds were in and around these buildings.
Normally I play some improvised music as the congregation is arriving and I help drown out the sound of the traffic outside.
Normally I play some improvised music as the congregation is arriving and I help drown out the sound of the traffic outside.
The “pitch” of the traffic noise is roughly between middle C and two semi-tones above.
What if I take this ‘drone’ as the starting point of a piece of music I create inside the empty church building.
I then set about creating a drone close in pitch to the traffic noise. Since I am the only person creating this piece I had to find a way to get a note to sustain on the organ while I am not physically there to play the note.
In order to gage the resistance of the ‘touch’ of a keyboard instrument you might put a pile of pound cousins on the key to see how many coins it takes to depress the key. The more coins the more resistant the key. I put a pile of coins onto one of the keys on the organ in order to be able to make it sound while I could go off to another area of the church to play the piano along with the drone it created. I also wanted a drone from one of the notes of the pedals of the organ and so placed a book on the pedal to keep it playing. Below is a video of me triggering these two pitches.
What if I take this ‘drone’ as the starting point of a piece of music I create inside the empty church building.
I then set about creating a drone close in pitch to the traffic noise. Since I am the only person creating this piece I had to find a way to get a note to sustain on the organ while I am not physically there to play the note.
In order to gage the resistance of the ‘touch’ of a keyboard instrument you might put a pile of pound cousins on the key to see how many coins it takes to depress the key. The more coins the more resistant the key. I put a pile of coins onto one of the keys on the organ in order to be able to make it sound while I could go off to another area of the church to play the piano along with the drone it created. I also wanted a drone from one of the notes of the pedals of the organ and so placed a book on the pedal to keep it playing. Below is a video of me triggering these two pitches.
With this constant drone I then moved to the piano which is situated on the lower level of the church (where the organ is in the organ ‘loft’ one floor above). This is a perspective of sound I never get since I am always producing the sound so the organ I only hear from being directly in front of it while playing. The picture below will give you an idea of the distance between the lower level (organ loft) and ground level (where the piano is).
Composition One
The video below is the first of three compositions which explore being influenced by the environmental sounds around the space in which they are created.
While the drone is constant from the organ I create a piece of piano music which moves around the pitch of the drone and often settles on the fundamental pitch of middle C (the ‘traffic noise drone’).
I created the composition below by recording my piano piece first and then listening back with ear-phones while recording interjections from me playing strings inside the piano (in and around the fundamental pitch). I then synched up the two recordings to make a piece which is in three layers - drone, piano composition, and piano string “interjections”.
In order to be able to play the strings inside the piano so the sound would ring on I had to keep the pedal down. Once again, being the only 'performer', I had to find a way to do this and, similarly to the organ solution, I used a weighty object to hold down the pedal. The piano stool (pictured below).
The video below is the first of three compositions which explore being influenced by the environmental sounds around the space in which they are created.
While the drone is constant from the organ I create a piece of piano music which moves around the pitch of the drone and often settles on the fundamental pitch of middle C (the ‘traffic noise drone’).
I created the composition below by recording my piano piece first and then listening back with ear-phones while recording interjections from me playing strings inside the piano (in and around the fundamental pitch). I then synched up the two recordings to make a piece which is in three layers - drone, piano composition, and piano string “interjections”.
In order to be able to play the strings inside the piano so the sound would ring on I had to keep the pedal down. Once again, being the only 'performer', I had to find a way to do this and, similarly to the organ solution, I used a weighty object to hold down the pedal. The piano stool (pictured below).
I titled this piece “Siubhal” which is the Gaelic word for “walks” (or “passing” or “traversing”). This word is used in connection with the playing of Pibroch where a player will create variations around the drone or “ground bass” of the Pibroch with variations (or 'siubhal')
In my piece the variations are harmonic. The fundamental pitch is constant throughout and the harmony in the piano music is sometimes sympathetic with the pitch of the organ drone (often returning to being in unison with the organ pitch) or sometimes the harmony is in direct conflict, but always clears away to restate, on the piano, a consonant sound with the pitch of the drone (for instance harmonising the drone with a simple major chord which recurs - one example is at 48'' seconds in the video). To signal this consonance more clearly this is where the strings of the piano are plucked. I also used a separate piano in a room behind the "sanctuary" where the organ is to add another timbre to the sound.
In my piece the variations are harmonic. The fundamental pitch is constant throughout and the harmony in the piano music is sometimes sympathetic with the pitch of the organ drone (often returning to being in unison with the organ pitch) or sometimes the harmony is in direct conflict, but always clears away to restate, on the piano, a consonant sound with the pitch of the drone (for instance harmonising the drone with a simple major chord which recurs - one example is at 48'' seconds in the video). To signal this consonance more clearly this is where the strings of the piano are plucked. I also used a separate piano in a room behind the "sanctuary" where the organ is to add another timbre to the sound.
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Composition Two
In the second composition I wanted to look at interpreting a space while not in the space. So everything I worked on in the church I wanted to translate into sound but at home. I reused the binaural traffic recording as the backbone of creating a work in a DAW. I already knew that the recoding produced pitches around middle C and I used mostly Spitfire Audio's "Labs" sample libraries. I first tried to find sound which complimented the sounds I hear around the church, but found that the "industrial" or "urban" sound libraries were too close to field recordings I could have recorded myself from the real sounds around the church. I chose to work with instrumental sounds which had some timbral connection with my own recording of the traffic noise. Their sample library "London Atmos" was doing something that I was looking for but was full of sounds not heard near me (London Underground, large traffic-jams, talking crowds etc)
Composition Two
In the second composition I wanted to look at interpreting a space while not in the space. So everything I worked on in the church I wanted to translate into sound but at home. I reused the binaural traffic recording as the backbone of creating a work in a DAW. I already knew that the recoding produced pitches around middle C and I used mostly Spitfire Audio's "Labs" sample libraries. I first tried to find sound which complimented the sounds I hear around the church, but found that the "industrial" or "urban" sound libraries were too close to field recordings I could have recorded myself from the real sounds around the church. I chose to work with instrumental sounds which had some timbral connection with my own recording of the traffic noise. Their sample library "London Atmos" was doing something that I was looking for but was full of sounds not heard near me (London Underground, large traffic-jams, talking crowds etc)
My very first attempt included instrumental sounds which had less defined pitches or would 'slide' pitch so the first two libraries I used were "Frozen Strings" (utilising string effects which were less focused on one exact pitch), and "Trumpet Fields" which Labs describes as being "long notes with a range of granular elements — from double tonguing to slow bends". Below is a screenshot of how the DAW looked in my first sketch (limiting the sounds to just 3 virtual instruments and two filed recordings (one being the traffic noise and one being a sample of an ambulance siren and its doppler effect).
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The ambulance sample didn't blend with the other sounds in the arrangement well and so I had to make them sound more like the sample library sounds I was using. I slowed the ambulance sound down by 300% and lowered the pitch by half an octave (pictured below).
This ambulance sound drops in pitch as it passes by. It goes from being a Gb to an F. This particular drop in pitch gives me a harmonic "leaning note" (or appoggiatura) onto the second note which creates the consonant harmony of an open fourth interval.
Below is a recording of the first attempt at using found sound and sample libraries.
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