Musique Concrète Composition

Compose and produce a musique concrète composition using the DAW (digital audio workstation, editing/mixing/producing software) of your choice (Pro Tools, Logic, Cubase, Digital Performer, Reaper, Live, Reason, etc.). Your composition should adhere to the following guidelines.

1. The duration should be 60 to 120 seconds. You will need to give some thought to how to compose a convincing musical form of that duration.

2. The only sound sources for your composition should be drawn from the recordings you and your classmates produced in the Recording assignment. Those sounds are available in this class's Files area of Canvas. Since those files constitute over 16 minutes of material, you clearly will not use all of it. It's suggested that you focus on a particular subset of the sounds that you find attractive, interesting, and useful.

 3. One of the objectives of this assignment is to get experience with "classic" musique concrète techniques of editing (splicing), mixing, transforming, and arranging sounds. For that reason, it's suggested that you favor organizing (composing the arrangement of) relatively short segments of sound over simply grabbing and layering large segments of preexisting recorded sound.

4. Your composition should include at least one example of each of the following "classic" techniques:
a) 'closed groove' (repeating a small segment of sound)
b) 'cut bell' (removing the attack portion of a sound to change its timbre)
c) reversing (playing a sound backward)
d) speed change (changing the playback speed, causing a commensurate change of pitch)
e) 'fusion' of sounds into a single element by having events occur at a very fast rate
f) mixing sound objects (get a composite sound by mixing two or more simultaneous sound objects)
g) panning sounds or locating them in particular parts of the stereo field

5. When you have completed your composition, save/bounce/export it to a single stereo audio file (WAVE or AIFF), and submit it here in this assignment on Canvas.

6. Please also submit a short text document explaining the musical concepts and/or specific techniques that guided your decision making when composing and producing your piece. In effect, describe the most important thoughts and actions that went into shaping your composition.