Thursday, April 1, 2010

The Evolution of a Song

Lots and lots of tracks and samples.

So, today I went through some of my old recordings searching for some illusive lost gem. What I ended up doing was going through a butt-load of my old recordings on Pro Tools and laughing at myself because, either, the sound quality was so abysmal, or, because the songs were just sooooooo bad. And I mean really bad. It is one of those times when you listen to a song and say "Please tell me I didn't write that. I did? God dammit!"

But I was also amazed at some of the stuff I found. Especially one piece that I had done for a project in my first year of college. What was even stranger is that I still happen to have about 9 different revisions of the song in my iTunes. I decided to start from the earliest and work my way up.

Now let me explain this project first. For the assignement we were give a set of 53 musical patterns known as In C. This semi-aleatoric piece was composed by Terry Riley in 1964 and is supposed to be played by a large ensemble of about 35 musicians. The musicians are supposed to just jump in randomly while a constant C is played on the piano. (Thanks Wikipedia!! I could not remember all of that.) You can listen to an original recording here, though, I would, in no way, suggest that you listen to more than about 1 minute and a half of it. As well an explanation of the piece with the separate musical score can be seen here.