Water

I was working in a garden over the summer, and I would hear all these
different noises of water flowing through pipes or spraying from a hose of
dripping onto the ground, and I wanted to find a way to combine water
sounds and turn them into a composition. I began by recording a variety of
sounds created by water, such as the sound of a dripping faucet and the
noise of the rain during a storm. I wanted the composition to have direction,
and I wanted the listener to feel its momentum change throughout. The
piece began lighter, followed by the thunderstorms, the climax, and finally,
ended with the calm after the storm. Because of the conceptual aspect of
using only sounds related to and coming from water, this piece falls under
the category of minimalist.
Wilson
I wanted the main focus of this piece to be sampling. Sampling is one of the
most widely used production methods in much of the music coming out
today. Kanye West is widely accredited to be one of the first mainstream
producers to use this method and really show its capabilities. To begin, I
chose a song which had vocals that were more or less easily distinguishable
from the music. I then cut those samples out and put them behind a beat I
produced. The song used was Jackie Wilsons Lonely Teardrops. I also chose
to incorporate a sample from the winner of a national speaking competition
and used clips from that. I also experimented with a high pass filter that only
lets sounds below or above a certain frequency through.
Drops
For this piece, I wanted to show the complexity of layering sounds. I began
with a very basic sample of water dripping. I then added the same sample
over it many times, at different intervals. My goal was to have the original
sample get lost, to have there be nothing distinguishable about the noise
that the piece was building up to. The piece builds up to that symphony, then

backs off, revealing the sample that the piece started with, leaving the piece
with a beginning, a climax, and an end.

Fortresses
This was one of the first pieces I completed. I wanted to experiment with
songwriting while still exploring what was capable via the production side of
music. I started writing and eventually came up with a short song I could
sing. I then added a basic piano melody underneath it, while incorporating
sounds that I recorded, as well as distorting my vocals throughout to make
the piece feel more like a memory, which was the concept behind the lyrics.
Running Away
For this piece, I really wanted to experiment with chopped and tuned vocal
samples. Its a lot of work to find a specific high quality vocal sample online if
you already know what youre looking for, so I decided to record my own
voice for this song. I decided that the backbone for this piece would be toned
down, as I wanted the focus of the piece to be on the sample; piano was the
main instrument I used, with very little other virtual instruments. I then took
the vocal samples I recorded and either raised them up or lowered them by
tones. This creates an effect where the voice is still recognizably human, yet
loses the individual tambour that it had, which can be desirable. I created
many different splices and arranged them to create movement within the
piece; the piece ended up having a relaxed tone yet still having direction the
entire way through.
Themes of Love
The idea behind this piece was to study the themes behind different media
and combine them into a single composition. One of the themes that
everyone has personal experience with is love, so I looked for different
medias to combine to show that theme. I chose poetry and music, and chose
the poem Scene by Maxine Chernoff, and the song Every Time We Say

Goodbye by Chet Baker. Both of those are about love in one form or another,
Chernoffs about the eclipsing nature of love, and Bakers about the sadness
that can accompany it. I then found or recorded samples for every word in
the poem, and strung them together over the song; all the different voices
represent how love is universal.