Sonic Youth Gossip - Compositional methods

Sonic Youth Gossip (http://www.sonicyouth.com/gossip/index.php)

- Non-Sonic Sounds (http://www.sonicyouth.com/gossip/forumdisplay.php?f=4)

- - Compositional methods (http://www.sonicyouth.com/gossip/showthread.php?t=10075)

Compositional methods

Struggling a little bit at this present time.

I work mainly on pre-recorded sounds therefore looping,manipulating and cut and paste methods are the primary way i make music.Does anyone else works this way and if you don't,what is your prefered method for composing music?

I improvise, and develop some stuff out of that. When doing noise, I just improvise, find different cool sounds at whatever settings, and remember the settings to make them again, shit like that... or just straight improv...

I need to point out that i don't just compose music but also landscapes (yes,i'm a wanker but....).The last thing that i had a convincing idea of is to do a recording of whatever envoirement i set my ears to,memorize it and isolate the volume of whatever is going on and then re-create it by re-recording as many sounds in it with a close microphone.It remains to be seen if i can achieve it.

As a last resort, maybe you could, I dunno, study theory or something. I know, I know....crazy.

i try and conceptualize things first. then i work within a key, improvising on a main theme until i find something to stick with.

Quote:

Originally Posted by evollove

As a last resort, maybe you could, I dunno, study theory or something. I know, I know....crazy.

Outside of acoustical study or musique concréte, there's not that much out there in terms of theory for what Porky's after.

I generally don't do a lot of composition, it takes me a fair while and I'm always dissatisfied with what I produce - except some stuff that I'm working on at the moment, which I'll hate once it's finished, no doubt - but I find pen and paper and an infinite supply of fags helps. Otherwise, it's battering away scales and modes that I rarely, if ever, use in group improv.

I work with loops, cutting and pasting... and I don't worry about composition so much as I just constantly decide to try new things to see if they work.. if you stumble upon 50 failed experiments but then find one really awesome new way of going about things, you've succeeded. You don't really fail until you quit, I guess...

Like, I just discovered how awesome time stretch can be. And fucking with 30-band equalizers. Shit like that.. most people totally gloss over every little button and knob of everything they fuck with, but I decide to master every little technique and effect one at a time.

Learning traditional ways of orgainizing pitch aren't going to help of course, but thinking about form can really be very useful and can be inspiring enough to break you out of a cycle of writer's block. Musical forms are very similar across all the different practices and throughout time, but while they evolve and change they conintue to maintain certain shared qualities. What I'm saying is don't think about the content(notes, pre-recorded sounds, etc.) first, but decide on a basic shape or form. Sometimes I draw little curvy lines showing hills and valleys - climaxes and points of repose. Studying classical form and rhetoric, jazz forms, popular song forms, and so on might be very inspiring, helping to provide a mould (flexible, of course) into which you can pour your ideas (main and secondary) and have a framework for developing them.

I write music often, but it's mostly small freely atonal or 12-tone pieces that nobody but myself ever hears. Sometimes I write fugues in the style of Bach too. I took some composition lessons recently and I mostly wrote piano pieces and some string quartet music. None of it is very good.

Quote:

Originally Posted by noumenal

This is one of the most interesting posts i've read in aeons.The drawing forms bit is particularly interesting as i can never mentally separate sound from vision so it makes perfect sense.I've overcome the struggling by simply absorbing more visually and aurally,if all this makes sense.

I work with feedback (guitar, contact mic, effect pedals) and pre-programmed loops (Yamaha RS7000).

I never have enough patience to fuck around and polish the track so most of my work is direct audio-in layering of sound in Cubase with only minor post-processing (effects and so). Almost everything I do is first-take.