Audio Production
Below are some examples showing my process for experimenting with music and natural sound.
While I was an Artist-in-Residence at Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park, I was tasked with creating a sonic portrait of the volcanic landscape to compel park visitors to see (or in this case, hear) the park in a radical new way. I first gathered several recordings of me smashing and clashing lava rocks together, which I cut into 19 short samples and fed them into a custom step sequencer (a visual beat generator) I made in the computer software Max/MSP. The sequencer was designed to churn out random patterns of beats, which I then finessed by adding, subtracting, or shifting beats over to my liking. This became the percussive foundation to these “lava rock beats,” where every sound you hear is a natural sound I recorded on the Big Island (the majority of which are from within the borders of Hawai’i Volcanoes National park). Some of the other sounds include birds (I believe it is an ʻōmaʻo), waves crashing at the Hōlei Sea Arch (makes a great bass drum hit), crickets in a grassy field, and this little shaker plant with gourds that my leg ran into on the petroglyphs trail. To see more from this project, go check out my page about my Hawai’i Volcanoes Artist Residency.
So I decided to put myself in a creative box: Re-record the entire Radiohead album “In Rainbows” using only a trumpet in my hands. This forced me to re-envision my 20 year relationship with the instrument and generate a new language of extended sound techniques. This track is by far my favorite, a summation of all the wild studio trickery I learned in the process: Slapping metal and slamming valves to get percussion sounds, digital pitch shifting to get a trombone-like bass line, studio plug-ins to get a “fuzz trumpet” effect, ghostly Max/MSP patches to further transform my sound. To see more from this project, explore the album on Bandcamp here.
What does the weather sound like? This is the question I tried to answer in my multifaceted project Currents, which uses the process of sonification to map sound onto weather/climate data. The project encompasses many forms, including a written score performed by live musicians and a fixed audio/visual piece that sonically represents the last 40 years of extreme weather events in the United States. In this particular clip, I gathered live meteorological readings from weather stations around the world using a complex suite of custom made software (Max/MSP accessing a weather API). From there I mapped temperature to pitch, pressure to a low moaning drone, and wind speed to a rhythmic pulse. See if you can hear all three! To see more, go check out my page about my weather data sonification project Currents.
This collaboration with the artist Alyssa Coffin cut across many mediums, including the creation of a “dance drawing” using ink on Alyssa’s feet as she moved across a canvas to this sound clip. All the sounds you hear were recorded from one single location in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The opening sound is a buzzing fly that has been pitch shifted down, time stretched, and extended with a long reverb tail. The piece becomes multi-layered with processed crickets, bird calls, and talking hikers. One of my favorite details is the running water sound, which produces a swirling effect by panning from speaker to speaker. To see more, go check out my page about my Great Smoky Mountains Artist Residency.
This track is a J Dilla-inspired beat that shows my continued fascination with alchemizing human sound (trumpet) and natural sound (birds, crickets, waterfalls). The natural sounds were recorded using a portable recording device (Zoom H4) during my trips over the years throughout national parks, including Great Smoky Mountains in 2018 and Hawai’i Volcanoes in 2019. They are intricately panned left/right across the sonic space to create a unique “forest” of sound. My favorite moment occurs when the crickets gently support the descending trumpet line and are later intertwined with the sounds of a black-capped chickadee. Using the computer software Max/MSP, I created a step sequencer that divided beats into groupings of five instead of the traditional four to let the percussion emulate the rhythmic feel of the Detroit producer J Dilla. Thanks to my friend Michael Malis for recording the keyboard chord progression!
This version of Macbeth was supposed to be a live stage production, but COVID-19 put the Grosse Pointe South Shakespeare Club into the predicament of creating a remotely recorded “podcast” version of the play instead. In addition to editing the audio (scrubbing background noise, EQ’ing, mixing, panning), I also assisted the actors in operating their audio equipment and recording their material. My favorite element of the sound design is the moment the witches make an apparition appear for Macbeth, which was created with a propane tank being struck with a hammer and then applying time stretching the sound. The eerie “possessed” sound at 0:16 was made using a custom piece of Max/MSP software that can randomly transform and process anyone’s vocals. Part of it involves reversing a sound, adding reverb to it, then reversing it back again. This produces a strange “swelling” effect where the reverb enters before the attack instead of after.
When COVID-19 shutdown schools in the spring of 2020, I had to quickly think on my feet to reinvent my music classroom for virtual lessons with my 500+ elementary music students. I settled on a podcast format, using the fanciest recording equipment (ahem…an SM58 microphone) to record everything myself in my professional home studio (ahem…my living room). This podcast episode was designed to teach my students about the connection between bird song and music. In the opening of the clip, I blur the line between the human and natural world by imitating bird calls through extended playing techniques on my trumpet (half valves, flutter tonguing). Later in the recording, pay attention to how I use left/right panning across the speakers to deconstruct the complex soundscape of five different bird songs all happening at once. To see more of these podcast episodes, click here.