Coach To The Airport
Notes on "COACH TO THE AIRPORT"
TRACK DATA
Composition tool: MuseScore 3, Studio One 6 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 6 Professional
Number of tracks: 87
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Sample One (All built-in sound sources of Studio One)
Composition and Recording period: Jun 6 2022 - Nov 11 2022
Small Series of Vehicle Music
(TM writes:)
You start to travel a foreign place where you've never been before so that you can free yourself on holiday. You go from your hometown to a big hub airport by coach (or long-distance bus) that takes perhaps a night.
What I was remembering specifically is a night coach departing from Coventry in Britain, where I used to reside, around 1 am to Heathrow in London in an early morning. It was a three-hours journey and I fell asleep in there but had to wake up quite quickly. It was dark when it arrived; I was quite sleepy but excited with the travel for somewhere I didn't know well about.
Within the "Placid Wanderings" series there is a small series of vehicle music, consisting of this work, "Stratosphere" and "Train From The Airport." But the vehicle series turned out to be it just eventually.
Composition
(TM continues:)
I made this piece very early in Placid Wanderings, which focuses on the concept of chill-out but FMT-esque music. "Coach..." follows the previous series of "Auditory Art For Visual Arts" in that it's a little bit structured in symmetry like "In The Mirror" (from the series). What I aimed then is to make some drums-&-bass-based music with symmetrical phrases.
I knew that if you used short tones like many in this work it turned hard to make it perfectly symmetrical. That was fine. I just designed only partly symmetrical -- only with the key phrases. The tentative title during the production was "Mirror Chillout."
Another method applied here from our other tracks is what we call "gating", which is pursued in "Gate Of Moss" and "Pebbles In The Garden." As I wrote the details on gating in the notes of those, in short, it's about rhythmically opening and closing the "gate" for a sustained noise such as raindrops in Gate... and Pebbles..., water in the track called "Spa Music" from the Placid... series, and a white noise in this.
These experimental methods (of symmetrical composition and gating) are used here in a more natural way; that's what I've aimed for this time.
It begins with a cello in G-sharp octave sounds. After those the first notes are G-sharp and D, dissonant from the very beginning; the bass continues to play G-sharp, whereas the sine-wave arpegio uses many Ds, Gs, G#s and D#s. Especially When the central phrase comes in, the bass moves a step down to G. Despite such strange sounds, it sound neither frightening nor unnatural, I think. That is put there to imply what we are going to do in the whole series.
(TI writes:)
I took apart the string part created by TM and replaced it with a Cello trio (or quartet in some places) and wrote a counter-melody for the Choir and Bell parts. The counter-melody was created in the opposite movement (symmetrical up and down in the score) to the phrase created by TM. This is a basic arrangement technique in classical music.
Sound Creation and Mixing
(TI continues:)
Various reinforcements are applied to the rhythm instrument tones set by TM.
The bass drum is reinforced with a sine wave release, and is played one octave lower, triggered by the bass part, and controlled by the Gate and Compressor to swing left and right (If you listen to the headphones, you can feel the bass moving left and right in some places at the timing of the bass drum release).
I also added the long release bass of the TR808, as used in hip-hop, for the accent beats.
I also synchronised white noise to the snare drum part and moved the localisation, as well as the bass drum. This one triggers the whole drum and controls the Gate and Compressor.
The snare drum is played in quarter notes on the score, so if the white noise is played as it is, the white noise will remain until the end of the beat. ), the gate is opened (so that white noise does not sound while the drums are sounding) and the sound is cut off at the timing when the next note comes in, so that white noise (or sine wave) comes in only in the gap where the drums are not sounding.
The sine wave also has a cassette tape-type EQ and reverse echo and delay applied in places.
The entire drums are subjected to a cassette tape-type EQ, which is further applied to the entire master track to cloud the overall sound image and create a slightly lo-fi finish, but the high-pass filter is programmed On-Off to make it hi-fi for a moment in places to create the effect of a single point in a black-and-white image. I aim to create the effect of adding colour to a monochrome image.
(TI continues:)
In this track, almost every part has its own white noise, and the noise is individually filtered and controlled according to the rhythm and development of the song.
However, the presence of white noise is probably difficult to hear at first listen.
What this means is that "the sense of pitch is not determined by the sounding entity itself, but by the way the listener listens". In other words, it's about 'which band (in a situation where there are all kinds of pitches) the ear picks up (or the brain tries to pick up)'.
It is, so to speak, the 'noise cancelling' function of the brain itself.
So, in some places in the middle of the track (for example, from around 3:25 minutes), the presence of that white noise is deliberately made clear. (This is because I have removed the pitch-sensitive part that is sounding together only in that part).
To begin with, white noise is 'every frequency band in a note'. However, the ear, which is the direct receptor organ, cannot catch all those frequencies, nor can the brain, which is the cognitive organ, process them.
The brain in particular is rather often fooled. In this piece, the brain recognises the tone and pitch of the musical part that is synchronised with the white noise, and is probably concentrating on that sound, so it is thought that the brain is less aware of the white noise.
And because white noise "includes all frequency bands" as mentioned above, it is also sounding in the frequency band of the synchronised musical part. Therefore, it is thought that where musical sounds are played together, white noise is also roughly caught in the audible bandwidth by the ear as a receptive organ, but the brain is pulled by the connection between the musical phrases and the listener's individual perception of the music, and "only the parts it wants to listen to and can easily hear" are recognised and interpreted as phrases.
It is, so to speak, like trick art with sound.
This kind of acoustic trickery is not this overt, but is also used a lot in mixes other than the kind of music we create (very ordinary pop, dance music, etc.).
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