Spa Music
Notes On "SPA MUSIC"
TRACK DATA
Composition tool: MuseScore 3, Studio One 5 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional & Studio One 6 Professional (Final Mix)
Number of tracks: 24
Sound source: MuseScore 3 (Timbares Of Heaven), Presence XT, Impact XT, Sample One (All built-in sound sources of Studio One)
Composition and Recording period: Apr 13 2022 - Jul 13 2022 (Final Mix: Dec 27 - 28)
(TM writes:)
Concept & Composition: Chillout in odd-beat polyrhythm and scale music
As I write in the notes on the piece called "Underground", final in the "Auditory Art For Visual Arts" series, it feels like a goal of the series. I set out to make this work just after composing "Underground", meaning during the production of "Auditory Art..." I needed a very different point of view at that juncture around April 2022 and then came to have an idea of some sort of a spa music series.
It might not be very different, however, in that it's a little bit like our "Newfangled Hotel Ambience" series. That could be a reason why I thought it wouldn't be disarming as a series or an album.
But some sort of chillout music with FMT's unique features is what I wanted then, so I opened a blank notation sheet and began with gradually changing scales. As you can see in the image, the first one is E phrygian (meaning E-F-G-A-B-C-D-E) and next the 7th note (ie, D) is made sharp (ie, D#). It is repeated once and then the 3rd becomes sharp (ie, G#). After that the 4th is also up, etc. It's not an ordinary way like "the key, tonality and chords first," but "the scale first."
That's how I very often compose the past FMT tracks. This time, I wanted much more chillout than "Newfangled Hotel Ambience." I remember I thought this way at the time but actually there are few chillout tracks in "Newfangled..." to me now.
The rhythm is a 5/4 time with polyrhythms. In my opinion, odd beats tend to generate a sort of nervousness, which is the opposite to the concept of relaxing music. Not only odd beats but the contemporariness tends to make listeners nervous or frightened (because it's so easy) and that's the point Brian Eno broke through.
Furthermore, it's also easy to remove the notion of the beat for contemporary chillout. Is that why it's 5/4? I must be mad...
What I mean by "spa" is like the above image. It's a huge hot-spring bath within a famous facility called Spa Resort Hawaiians located in Fukushima, Japan. I've been there just once but I love this particular bath.
One of my favourite components in this track is what's like musique concrète with the water sound that TI added. It's merely water sound at the beginning, but it becomes rhythmic, which is enabled with the method of what we call "gating," as referred to in the notes on "Blanket Of Moss" and "Pebbles In The Garden."
As TI explains later, there are two versions* of this work, which we temporarily call here "First" and "Second." Nonetheless, "Second" was released before "First." Sorry it's very confusing but the First and Second were the order of production rather than release.
(Actually, during production, we called them "Spa Music" and "Spa Music New," respectively, but even I'm not confident in which is which... I might be re-writing these temporary titles depending upon the formal title of the First version.)
*There were two versions at the time being released. The "Low Frequency Therapy" version was later recorded after and in addition to these two.
Production Process
(TI writes:)
The MuseScore score entitled 'Spa Music' sent to me by TM was nearly complete, so I transferred it directly to Studio One, imagined it as my own relaxation music, or more specifically, 'a broadcast inside a spa facility', created the tones, deconstructed and modified the phrases and harmonies created by TM, and assembled the music.
That take is "First Version" having more complex tonality and acoustics than "Second Version", and was inspired by a kind of cyberpunk oriental taste, which is also what I had in mind when I made it.
However, that take was not the sound and atmosphere that TM had in mind, so we decided to keep that First Version and create "Second" in order to make it more in line with TM's image.
Second Version was mixed and completed in Studio One 5 Professional, but when we updated to Studio One 6 Professional just before the release, it sounded very good and there were almost no compatibility issues with the '5' version, so we re-mixed the track in " I've been mixing it again in '6'.
This Second Version basically uses the same tones that TM used in MuseScore. So the structure of the sound is very simple, including the tones and effects.
This is combined with rhythmic water sounds. The number of tracks is also small in FMT, at 24 tracks.
"Gating"
The 'water sound rhythm' described by TM is actually based on the one used in Second Version.
I think it was 'Particles Behaving Like Waves' where the 'Gating' mentioned by TM was first done. I think it was the first time I sequenced the On and Off information of the reverb component of this song and used the reverb component for the rhythm.
When I was creating this 'Spa Music', TM presented me with the free material 'spa sounds' as 'this kind of image', and I simply put it in the top track of the file I was working on as a background, and played it throughout the production, but then I suddenly wondered if I could use the water sound itself as a rhythm I wondered, "Couldn't this water sound itself be used as a rhythmic instrument?" I thought, "It might be interesting if I could make it sound like it was really ticking a rhythm, rather than an illusion, when I'm listening to natural or environmental sounds in a daze. TM was amused by this, and said, "Let's name it 'Gating' and make a song out of it", which led to the creation of several songs.
In order to make a difference between the two versions, and because First has a more lively sound, we decided not to add the sound of water, but to put it in the simpler Second Version.
Notes On "SPA MUSIC (Low Frequency Therapy)"
This note that follows below is about the remixed version released in September 2023.
TRACK DATA
Composition tool: MuseScore 3, Studio One 6 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional, Studio One 6 Professional(Remix)
Number of tracks: 60, 28(Remix)
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Sample One (All built-in sound sources of Studio One)
Composition and Recording period: Apr 13 2022 - Jul 17 2023, Sep 9 2023 - Sep 20 2023
(TI writes:)
This version is based on a version created before already released Spa Music.
The score is exactly the same as the previously released version of Spa Music, but the tone and mix are completely different.
The previously released version was mixed according to the tones used in the score originally created by TM in MuseScore, whereas in this version, TI has interpreted TM's score, deconstructed the harmonies and assigned them to different tones and registers.
Various discoveries were made during this decomposition and reconstruction. The Japanese national anthem was hidden in the middle break and the ending, although TM confirmed that he was not aware of this at all and rather eliminated the Japanese elements, but the melody of the Japanese national anthem is hidden in the harmonies he wrote (listen carefully).
As for the mix, the synth pad sound was inverted to create a centre in the localisation, and acoustic expansion to the left and right, and a strong compressor was applied to create an atmosphere as if it was sounding behind. In contrast, instrumental tones such as piano, harp and rhythms are centred to improve sound separation.
The pitch of each track is randomly shifted by 20-30% to make the pitch unstable and cut below 60khz to separate the sound from the bass.
The bass is cut above 60 Hz with a low-pass filter, so that only the heavy bass is heard. The subtitle is superimposed on the Low-Frequency Massage Therapy Machine in the lobby of a Japanese hot spring resort, the synthesizer's LFO and the low-frequency bass.
Comments