Unloosed

Notes on "UNLOOSED"

TRACK DATA

Composition tool: MuseScore 3, Studio One 5 Professional

Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional

Number of tracks: 118

Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Mai-Tai, Mojito (All built-in sound sources of Studio One), TAL-NOIZEMAKER

Composition and Recording period: Jun 25 2022 - 1 July 2022

The FURICO Music Team - Music Works · Unloosed

Concept: "Stereo Play"

(TM writes:)

The concept of the track "Unloosed" is what I call a stereo play. The word "stereo" is said to have come from a Greek word that means hard or stiff. Okay, the title is "Unloosed" meaning to loosen the hard thing. That's what I wrote in Japanese just below the title in the notation.

If you look at the part names in the left space, it reads from the top: "Sound Effects", "Left Piano", "Left Weak Piano", "Right Piano", "Right Weak Piano", "Left Sine Wave Bass", "Right Sine Wave Bass", "Left Drum Machine" and "Right Drum Machine." Obviously, most of the parts were written separately for the left and right and each pair of the left and right (pianos and others) was designed as the same sounds. I don't think I've ever seen such composition. 

Presumably, your ears will recognise a consecutive phrase on a pair of pianos, even though they were written separately as in this notation above, which is an example of auditory illusion. It's just effect of your brain integrating information from your left ear as well as from the right. The "stereo play" is that sort of things.

When you proceed to Bars 18 and 19 (between the two blue vertical lines), a relatively lower phrase appears but, again, it was written as separate phrases; it's just connected by your brain to sound consecutively. In fact, the lower notes are just parts of the separate pianos. But each part doesn't sound consecutively -- rather, it sounds as if one lower phrase were newly added. This is the second stereo play.

Some time later you may find another play like above. The sine wave basses are entangled with each other. The first notes, for instance, are both B-flat and that results in just one tone sounding at the centre, which is another illusion.

In fact, I took quite a lot of time to study researches on the auditory illusion, and then I found there were few musical works applying such human hearing. Of course there exist some in order to explain such phenomena with actual music examples but they are so... either primitive or simply awful as music. (Sorry to say badly but it's true. I know and understand researchers are not necessarily musically progressive, though.) 

In fine arts, on the other hand, a lot of works have brought human visual recognition into play. A good example is the perspective. I was wondering what is equivalent to it in music and couldn't find the answers. Anyway, I found the raison d'être of creating music like this, or an album like this.

We are making other stereo plays in the track called "Parallel." Unloosed is more suitable, I think, for stereo play beginners, while Parallel is so for the more advanced. (It's funny if the stereo play has several levels like these.)  

Composition: 3-Dimensional and Smooth

(TM writes:)

If I'm asked what chords are used in here, I won't be able to answer. It must be

obvious that this work doesn't pursue the traditional ways of putting chords. Quite similarly to FMT's other tracks, the main parts on the electric pianos only play dyads on a certain scale (to some degree) and basically avoids the three degrees to keep it atonal. Most of today's musicians are too reluctant to make developments from atonal music, even though a plenty of time has passed since a historically important event occurs, which is the emergence of atonality in the contemporary music. Tonality is fine, but I just wonder why there is so little music that tries to develop atonality. 

The basic parts are simple: Electric pianos, sine wave basses and drums. But their components are complex. All of these are dual, I mean the pianos have two parts: the left and right. Similarly, there are the left and right basses as well as the left and right drums.

Each of the left (L) and right (R) pianos have the strong (S) and weak (W) ones. So, we have four pianos in sum: LS, LW, RS, RW.

I didn't write just one phrase and divide it into the complex parts, but instead, did write them all separately so that the whole sound becomes three-dimensional.

Well, in terms of the parts, things are complicated enough and therefore how the phrases are structures is even more so. I stop here, but just would like to say one thing -- I intended to make the whole piece quite smooth.

(TI writes:)

For this track as well, TM created the basic parts and then added and arranged some parts.

Here are the actions I took (excerpts from the production notes).

-  I added long tones from bar 118 to bar 147.

-  I added a new phrase in bars 50-65, which is one part in MuseScore, but I spaced it out one note at a time and localised it left and right (I used 20 tracks for these).

-  I have added a little harmony to the phrases in the top and second rows of the MuseScore score written by TM.

-  For bars 117-118, I have created ascending and descending phrases by breaking them apart and mirroring them up and down. This is combined with the synth sound itself, which is oscillator-synced to lower the pitch, so that it sounds (left and right) as if it is ascending or descending.

Mixing

(TI writes:)

This mix is somewhat inspired by Phill Spector's 'Wall Of Sound'.

The Wall Of Sound (as invented by Phill Spector) is a Mono Track overlaid with different performances of the same instrument to create thickness.

The mix is in stereo, and sounds rather like it is spread wide left and right, but the intention of the people making it is to have different tracks of the complete Mono Track in Left, Centre and Right. Each track has a narrower sound field so that it does not spread to the left and right.

It is, so to speak, 'three mono tracks playing at the same time'.

Only about four bars in the middle of the track (the part of the rising and falling phrases of the oscillator sync) are moved left and right.

Also, only three different timbres are used except for the rhythm (electric piano, Sinewave and synth strings (with some variations)). These are layered on top of each other to create the thickness of the sound. I used 113 tracks for the non-rhythm tracks.

However, in the rhythm track, there are places where the left and right tracks are blurred and sound centred. This is because the same instrument is playing on both parts at the same time.

Delays and reverbs are mono, and phase-shifting effectors such as Chorus and phasers are not used, as they expand the sound image and make it difficult to localise the sound.

For this track (version), I'm going to thoroughly eliminate the elements that make it exciting (the phrases themselves have elements that make it exciting , but I'm mixing them without daring to bring them out).