5 - Pencil & Paper

Pencil & Paper Composition

This week's composition was very different to the previous ones.

We were simply given a piece of blank paper and a pencil and told that these were to be our only sources of audio for the composition.

Research

The creation process of this piece is probably most akin to Pierre Schaeffer's Études de bruits in which he creates 5 pieces using a limited sound source for each and concentrates on modifying the sounds to create his pieces. The resulting pieces provided much of the foundation for Musique Concrete.

Selection of Samples

I spent a while experimenting with the different sounds that could be made. The obvious options were the sounds of drawing, paper tearing and pencil snapping. I set up a condenser microphone very close to the paper and recorded a few lines and dots, creating long and short sounds by dotting the paper and drawing lines and swirls. I also recorded the sound of the paper ripping. I opted not to use the sound of the pencil snapping as it seemed too obvious and felt it would result in my piece being too predictable.

Collection of recorded sounds

After recording i scanned through the different sounds and created a small collection of just 3 pencil sounds and one tearing sound.

Three selected sounds

Technique

To make the sounds more interesting I used a few of the effects within ProTools' AudioSuite menu. I used pitch-shift and distort to their extremities on a few versions of each sound.

Distortion Unit

Pitch shift unit

Time shift unit

The other tool I used was the ProTools time stretch function. Since it was the creation of sounds and not the preservation of sounds that was important I stretched the audio to the point where it was full of artefacts. After consolidating the clip I stretched it again and again to create even more artefacts to the point where the audio was breaking up into what sounded like computerised bleeps. The screenshots below show the extremities of the time stretching (note that the images are at the same zoom level).

Audio Clip before time stretch

Audio Clip after time stretch

I used a mix of these two techniques with each sound, often running sounds through the methods multiple times and switching back and forth between the methods, I.e. pitch shift, stretch, pitch shift, stretch, distort, stretch, pitch shift, stretch, stretch.

This process helped to create a wide array of sounds allowing me to create an extensive sonic landscape.

Overview of edit window

I also used a mashup of plugins that fed back and forth into each other, creating feedback loops and effects upon effects - such as a reverb feeding into a delay that fed into a distortion that fed into a ring modulator that fed back into the original reverb, and thus continued the cycle.

overview of mix window

Composition Influence

A piece that heavily influenced my composition was Jonty Harrison's "Klang". This piece made use of a basic sound source that was affected t a heavy degree to create a whole new sonic landscape that had a spacey feel to it. I felt that with some of the sounds that I had created I would be best served following a similar route to Jonty Harrison.

Structure

The structure of the piece followed Klang to a degree in the sense that it begins and ends with the source sounds but throughout the middle section the piece goes off into a completely unrelated area of sound. In Klang Jonty Harrison also makes use of digitised sounds to give a sci-fi feel to the piece and this is something that I also used in my composition.

Paper Scratcher