Cyber-Excavating The Ruins
Notes On “Cyber-Excavating The Ruins”
Both SoundCloud and YouTube are FURICO's first High-Definition sound.
SoundCloud:
YouTube (with notation):
(We apologise for the gap between the sound and highlight.)
Track Data
Composition tool: MuseScore, Studio One 4 ProfessionalRecording tool (DAW): Studio One 4 Professional
Number of tracks: 95
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Mai-Tai, Mojito (All built-in sound sources of Studio One), TAL-NoiseMaker
Composition and recording period: 7 December 2019 - 6 January 2020
Orchestral and Cybernetic
At the very beginning we planned to extend the previous work “Hyper Chase For The Ruins,” meaning play digital phrases (that hardly exist) in orchestra this time. It’s orchestral but cybernetic at the same time. The title implies that.
The tentative title was “Orche.”
Inductive Composition
For Orchestral music in general, chords and melodies are composed with some instrument, which then are stretched into the various parts like pizza dough. We, instead, composed WITH ORCHESTRA from the start, thanks to technologies. Moreover, it’s not just based on melodies and motifs, but originates in a scale and rhythms, which seems rare to compose and arrange music for orchestras.
The scale here is basically D Persian (D, Eb, F#, G, Ab, Bb, C, D). As you can see on the notation on YouTube (as above), the signature has three flats on A, B and E, generally meaning Eb major or C minor, but it doesn’t in this case and is atonal. At first all the parts (which are virtually all monophonic) sound D in fragmented timings and then the tones are altered in the Persian scale (basically).
The pizza-dough composition / arrangement is to create the rough whole and decorate details, namely deductive, whilst this track was composed quite inductively.
We can probably assert that all (or almost at least) orchestra composers and arrangers never build music this way. But we made a lot of changes after initial composition and arrangement, which was extremely difficult and took time. In fact, this work was finally formed after we deleted so many phrases. The deletion was so important we could reach the core of this track.
Beats in the Orchestra
As the notes are fragmented, we designed the simple timpani (-like sound with some noise) as the rhythm guide. But it’s TIMPANI, ie, percussion that contains tones. The tones were designed in complex and extra-ordinary ways. It requires around 14 timpanis, for example.
Some parts were supplemented after the basic structure was built and one of them is the drums. We didn’t think we needed the drums when composing it with the “pure” orchestra, but we tried to insert them. The beats were made extra-ordinary enough eventually and thus we decided to bring them in.
Anyway, we aimed at combination between the orchestra and beats, which is unlikely to exist.
Sound Making and Mixing: Unnatural but Smooth
We’d like to emphsise that this is NOT to simulate an orchestra electronically. That’s NOT our intention at all. Here, instead, there is no obvious border between the orchestral instruments and others.
In order to do something different with the instrumental composition of orchestra, in other words, to do what the orchestra cannot do, we thought that we should not deviate from the basic structure of the orchestra. Therefore, the instrument configuration, localization, and volume balance should follow the basic arrangement of the full orchestra.
Based on the orchestral instrument sounds described in the musical scores on MuseScore, the tones were divided into "simulated sounds for that instrument" for each piece of music.
The orchestral instruments have been replaced like a mosaic with several sounds close to raw instruments as follows:
- Sampling sound sources of live musical instruments
- Synthesizer sound sources simulating raw musical instruments
- Sample sounds of similar old electronic musical instruments (solina and melotron)
So, for instance, some of the orchestral instruments are substituted to alike synthesised sounds. Non-orchestral instruments including noise gradually appear and increase. The non-orchestra sounds include sampling of actual orchestras, performing Prokofiev, Ravel, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Tchaikovsky, and Gershwin.
But it might be surprising that only 10 - 20% of the sounds in the track were played with synthesizers; the rest as many as 80 - 90% with sample players, samplers and drum samplers.
Mixing these sounds, we used "normal mix” (the basic setting of Studio One) and a “mix that distorts digitally and generates glitch noise.” We made mixdowns with "mixes with white noise over an analog console simulator" and then created "mixes that were separated by differences in equalizing", and finally cut and joined nine master mix files.
We aimed for a texture that is "unnatural but smoothly connected" and "something smooth but unnatural". We wanted to express some kind of body expansion like prostheses.
To create that feeling, we took the mixing works of German mixing engineer Conny Plank into account. Specifically, we referred to the mixes in the rock-band-style New Wave albums such as early Ultravox and DEVO.
For mastering, we asked a wonderful American-based electronic musician we knew on SoundCloud, who also mastered "Hyper Chase For The Ruins". He understood the concept of our music and built a very nice sound. Also, his ideas were different from the usual procedure (which would not be done by ordinary engineers).