Musique Concrete
Musique concrete seems to me like the precursor to a modern genre of music that I enjoy a lot. Its generally referred to as Hyperpop, but is also considered to be experimental/avant garde pop music. They use many techniques found in modern pop music, but use them in an exaggerated way. Some artists include 100 Gecs, late Charli XCX, and Dorian Electra. They manipulate samples and raw data in a way very similar to musique concrete. For my project I used a 100 Gecs song "I need help immediately" as inspiration.
I remember hearing that 100 Gecs released the "stems" of their songs for download. The stem is essentially each track from their original project exported as its own mp3. This allows people to import each file into a program like audacity and look at how the tracks fit together. Unfortunately, they are only wave files, so you can't see how they manipulated the sounds to get the end product but I found it useful nonetheless.
For my project, I copied some of their samples and put them into my own composition. I began with the siren sound effect. I slowed it down, duplicated, and reversed it so that there would be a seamless transition. I added reverb and changed the pitches. I moved on to a different style completely using one of their "woosh" sound effects. Going into a strange drum beat, I added a generated pluck sound effect and pitch shifted it to get a melody. After that, I generated a noise sound effect and used the envelope tool to fade it in and out. I ended the composition with a slowed down reverby snare hit.
Overall, working in audacity was kind of a pain. It is not very intuitive and I found myself very frustrated and needing to do strange workarounds to do what I wanted. This is the first time I've composed in the program and trying to keep a steady beat was difficult. It is a very capable program and if I spent more time in it I would probably enjoy it; however, I would rather use that time learning a program like Ableton or Protools.
Comments
Post a Comment