thanks for listening, Pekay and William. And plase, don't start a flame war about whether this "is" music or not [;)]

Wikipedia has an interesting article, a sort of a discussion about the definition of music: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_music

Anyhow, my position: I made it with the intention to make music, so…

Some people here in Cork, Ireland, refer to some of my work as Sound Art. When I ask them to draw a line between Sound Art and Music, they sometimes get stuck. In my own native language (German) "Tonkünstler" translates into Sound Artist - but in German, it is just another word for a composer of Art Music.

A young friend of mine asked me what I reckoned the difference was between a sound design and a composition, and I got stuck. In the end, we settled on something like "it's probably like the difference between a design and a picture: all designs are pictures, but not all pictures are designs".

William, I tried it - it's quite impossible to tell the difference between divisi and unison strings in these dense clouds of sounds. These are not 150 layered tracks - I'd have neither the computing power nor the patience for doing that. They are synthesized as a single stereo sound event, using granular synthesis techniques with little VSL motifs and some drones as raw material… oh, and by "amateur" I actually simply mean that I don't do it for a living, and that puts me into a position to do it because it is a worthwhile artistic pursuit - or because it is FUN.

A very refreshing approach to music!

Thanks for sharing.

@Feenixx said:

[...] In my own native language (German) "Tonkünstler" translates into Sound Artist - but in German, it is just another word for a composer of Art Music. [...]

Hehehe ... my Avatar on some other forums:

;-D

Veetguitar and Corte, thanks for listening and commenting. I reckon I'll continue posting some of my "off the mainstream" work. I feel encouraged by the comments I get.

@Veeguitar, I have music streaming from your "music for media" page playing in the background - some very tasty morsels… It's a shame you were not around when I was a child…

@Dietz, der Tonkünstler : I had an idea yesterday evening, and there is a chance you may not have to wait very long at all to hear a VSL re-make of a Club Dance piece I made for Frankie Knuckles' 50th birthday a couple oif years ago.

@Feenixx said:

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@Feenixx said:

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you have examples of some very cool projects for children on your Web site - nobody was doing anything like that in the early 1950s

Thanks for listening!

Back to the subject:

Feenixx, do you go totally by ear when doing these clusters or are there some techniques/guidelines to let them shine?

@veetguitar said:

...

Feenixx, do you go totally by ear when doing these clusters or are there some techniques/guidelines to let them shine?

veetguitar, it's mainly by ear - some people can plan it and get the results they visualize, but I haven't got the experience. I need to keep playing back, the sounds I am working on, tweaking values and parameters, listen again… and again...

A buddy of mine is working towards a PhD in composition, and I draw on his help as a programmer.

There are three different levels at which I manipulate the raw material (which are VSL bounces of short textures, single notes and chords), and the process involves four steps:

1 - visual programming and tweaking the code in a variety of interfaces he wrote, using a programming system and language called Max/MSP, breaking the sounds down into "clouds" of "grains".

2 - spectrum manipulation, courtesy of FFT tools he wrote, performed on the grains

3 - visual programming again - stretching, envelope shaping and re-assembling the grains

4 - there is a very cool Mac program called Metasynth, which is a favourite among "IDM" and other Electronica producers for making "beats". I use it for what looks like sequencing, but it is really a form of re-synthesis. It has a feature called "Image Synth", which lets me paint stereo position, volume and pitch over time from left to right on a canvas. It can handle up to 2048 "tracks" - but for live monitoring and tweaking, I am limited to "only" about 500 tracks. Unless I use microtuning, I can only hear about 110 different pitches.

Step 4 results in audio files, which I assemble in Logic.

Keep up the great work. I really appreciated the spatial dimensions achieved with the sonarities being stretched to the max-in terms of pitch wise highest highs to lowest lows. The use of extremly 'thin' sounds as juxtaposed to 'thick' almost concreteness is great also.