dance collaboration - maddie davies-mee
This year I persevered once again to the dance meeting, on my third of showing my weird music, hoping at least one of the dancers are into my silly little bleeps and bloops. I played a little demo (linked below), but no one really came up to me. Thankfully, I was already fairly busy with another project for the Kickstart festival, so I left with a fair amount of confidence that no one would pick me.
The next day, Maddie Davies-Mee messages me, and says that she was super into my stuff, and asked if I would be able to make music for her performance, based on the seven sins. Aside from that, she didn't give me that many more restrictions. So, with ultimate freedom, I decided to move straight away.
Making seven individual tracks is fairly hard, all each distinguishable from each other even harder, but at least I didn't have any problems with the sins themselves. I've researched for other creative endeavors and general curiousity about the seven sins. Pride is the root of all evil, and then all the other six are equally bad. When I started the process, I just followed the steps on the Wikipedia page. And then, after a couple notes, shuffles, and messages back and forth between Maddie and I, we established an order and how the piece will generally go.
- Between each sin is five seconds of noise, to make sure the dancers can reset.
- The piece starts with a teaser of the pride section, and then lust, greed, gluttony, sloth, envy, wrath, and then pride.
- Under 10 minutes.
And now, a paragraph for each sin and how I adapted each of them into little collections of sound.
LUST: The... moans came from a royalty-free... hentai soundboard that exists for some reason I'm presuming, but hey was it handy for this. The saxophone was also a royalty-free clip from a Youtube search of "sexy sax". That was not a good day for my search history. After that debacle, I put some chorus & reverb on sax and stretched it to hell and back, while the moans I put through various effects, including time-stretching, paul-stretching, an inbuilt glitch effect, flutter, delay, pitch-shift... just as much as I could fit.
In addition to all of that is a simple sine chord, which is surprisingly clear in the left channel now that I listen back to it. It's just to even things out and to give the section a unique sound.
GREED: This is just a royalty-free sample of some coins dropping, and using a bunch of effects to make it interesting. It was fun and quick to make, the best kind of music. You can almost taste the copper.
GLUTTONY: I hope this one sounds okay because I did not listen to it a lot while making it. When I think gluttony, I think of those ASMR mukbang videos, where people eat food loudly. Apparently it's a big market, but I just despise it. Anywho, I sampled it in Audacity (with my headphones off), approximated effects, put the glitch effect on from before, which applies randomly to the whole sound, which is nice, and put a version pitched down on the left channel. I also remember making some mouth sounds to add, but I didn't listen them too much either.
SLOTH: Royalty-free samples yet again! This time some crowd-sounds, just slowed dramatically, while a clock ticks slower and slo w e r a n d s l o w e r , overall a fun and simple one to make.
ENVY: When I think envy, I think of rich people one-upping each other in pompous wigs and silly clothes, so to draw on that image, I found a string quartet written by some dead white dude (I jest I jest, I think Haydn? I don't listen to that music typically), doubled it to two tracks, and put each of them into Modsquad (my favourite max patch), and edited the speed of which they were played, and it turned out so well.
WRATH: There were three different tracks mixed together for this. Three times did I whack my hands on a MIDI keyboard in the lowest octave range I could play at that was heard. Two of the tracks were on the drum setting, which is where all the drum sounds are coming from. I sadly had to put a compressor on so it didn't get too loud, but it is as noisy as it should be, I think. Kinda sounds like a hurricane, or at least what I think a hurricane sounds like.
PRIDE: Pride, in Catholic philosophy, is cunning, subtle, but is the sin most closely aligned with ego and human selfishness; the root of all other sins. So although every other sin in the piece has been very obvious and nuance-less, I feel like the sounds I made for the Pride section was nuanced, dirty, but not evidently bad at first, but it becomes icky to sit in.
In addition to all of that is a simple sine chord, which is surprisingly clear in the left channel now that I listen back to it. It's just to even things out and to give the section a unique sound.
GREED: This is just a royalty-free sample of some coins dropping, and using a bunch of effects to make it interesting. It was fun and quick to make, the best kind of music. You can almost taste the copper.
GLUTTONY: I hope this one sounds okay because I did not listen to it a lot while making it. When I think gluttony, I think of those ASMR mukbang videos, where people eat food loudly. Apparently it's a big market, but I just despise it. Anywho, I sampled it in Audacity (with my headphones off), approximated effects, put the glitch effect on from before, which applies randomly to the whole sound, which is nice, and put a version pitched down on the left channel. I also remember making some mouth sounds to add, but I didn't listen them too much either.
SLOTH: Royalty-free samples yet again! This time some crowd-sounds, just slowed dramatically, while a clock ticks slower and slo w e r a n d s l o w e r , overall a fun and simple one to make.
ENVY: When I think envy, I think of rich people one-upping each other in pompous wigs and silly clothes, so to draw on that image, I found a string quartet written by some dead white dude (I jest I jest, I think Haydn? I don't listen to that music typically), doubled it to two tracks, and put each of them into Modsquad (my favourite max patch), and edited the speed of which they were played, and it turned out so well.
WRATH: There were three different tracks mixed together for this. Three times did I whack my hands on a MIDI keyboard in the lowest octave range I could play at that was heard. Two of the tracks were on the drum setting, which is where all the drum sounds are coming from. I sadly had to put a compressor on so it didn't get too loud, but it is as noisy as it should be, I think. Kinda sounds like a hurricane, or at least what I think a hurricane sounds like.
PRIDE: Pride, in Catholic philosophy, is cunning, subtle, but is the sin most closely aligned with ego and human selfishness; the root of all other sins. So although every other sin in the piece has been very obvious and nuance-less, I feel like the sounds I made for the Pride section was nuanced, dirty, but not evidently bad at first, but it becomes icky to sit in.
a note about the seven sins: The seven sins are Catholic philosophy, which meant I was, as a part of a community of minorities oppressed by the Catholics, a little off-put by the whole idea, but it turns out the seven sins aren't there to point out the regular human desires to be angry sometimes, or be jealous, or take a nap every once in a while, or to be prideful in yourself, but are instead there to warn about the extremes; when these traits becomes dangerous and destructive to yourself or people around you. Taking a nap at an inconvenient time due to genuinely being tired isn't sloth, but taking a ridiculous number of naps for the explicit purpose of getting out of work is. Being prideful in yourself isn't inherently bad, but if you are too proud in yourself, to a point that you're putting other people down, is a bad thing. Sex isn't bad or something to be embarrassed about, even per-marital sex in this post-modern, post-religion world, but if you're using sex to belittle the other party/parties without consent, then that's bad.
Some Catholics might disagree, and say that any of these things to any degree is bad, but that is an opinion not held by most modern theologians, and is probably a good indicator that they don't particularly know the religion they claim to be a part of, instead of the cult that they actually are in. And always remember, if you don't sin, then Jesus died for nothing (said jokingly).
Some Catholics might disagree, and say that any of these things to any degree is bad, but that is an opinion not held by most modern theologians, and is probably a good indicator that they don't particularly know the religion they claim to be a part of, instead of the cult that they actually are in. And always remember, if you don't sin, then Jesus died for nothing (said jokingly).