Uranus
Notes On "URANUS"
SoundCloud:
YouTube (Notation Video):
Track Data
Composition tool: MuseScore, Studio One 4 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 4 Professional
Number of tracks: 98
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Mai-Tai, Mojito (All built-in sound sources of Studio One), TAL-NOIZEMAKER
Composition and Recording period: June 15 2020 - Aug 23 2020
CONCEPT: AFRICAN & DIGITAL IN QUINTUPLETS
(TM writes:)
The concept of this track is the entwined combination of African percussion and such digital sounds as sine waves in quintuplets. Once I wrote phrases like that, I found it very interesting and somewhat similar to our previous work, “Mercury.” So I came up with the idea to put this track into the Planet Series, which comprises “Mercury”, “Vista At Landing” (Earth), and “Pluto.”
Having said that the percussion is African, I made the rhythm very strange and noticeable. Within the solar system planets it must be just Uranus. Nothing else.
In short, Uranus has its north pole on the side… meaning the rotation axis is laid almost horizontal. The one lap to orbit around the sun takes 80 years… meaning the poles a day lasts for 40 years and the same for a night. The cause of the axis being laid down is still unknown. It has so many mysteries.
One thing very important to me artistically is not to make terrifying expressions. Some musicians do that in order for their work to sound “artistic.” If the theme is what has mysteries like Uranus, many might make it a dark terrifying sound. I would understand that, but it’s very ordinary, isn’t it?
I feel so sorry that every artistic aspect has been taken away from so many works of music, films, dance and so forth in today’s world and what has been left is just business aspects, which have nothing new or nothing exciting.
Anyway, there are some other reasons why this was named Uranus, which I will describe later.
(TI writes:)
This is probably the third track I've started working on as part of the Planet Series, but as I mentioned in Notes on “Mercury”, I am not that interested in space (to be honest, at all) .
But I know enough about the order of the planets and the subtlety of Pluto entering the planets and the occasional switching of the Neptune/Pluto alignment. This is because I took my schoolwork rather seriously.
My only image of Uranus was that it was quite far from the Earth and that it was at the edge of the galaxy. So my image of Uranus was that it was a small star that could be seen in the distance. It was like a small station far away from the center of the city.
So, through this track, I did a lot of research on Uranus and was astonished to find that it was completely different from what I thought it was.
First of all, I was surprised to find out that it's much bigger than the Earth. Although I thought it was like a small station in the countryside, in fact it's a big station with a big wheelhouse, rather. Well, there's a lot of land in the countryside, so that kind of thing is quite common. The illusion that it's small because it's so far away is like perspective in visual representation; it's not reality.
Moreover, Uranus has a vertical rotation. I wish they had taught me this important stuff in school. At least I don't remember learning it in school. I attended school seriously until about junior high school, and I didn't fall asleep in class. So perhaps I'm not wrong (in saying the school didn’t teach that).
Vertical rotation means that there are areas that are daytime all the time, and there are areas that are nighttime all the time. And I think it's weird to have areas that are sunset all the time and morning sunrise all the time. It's quaint because it's a moment in time.
“How do I make music out of this?” I thought. This time there is no motif of musicians or cartoons like Mercury. I felt like I was left all alone in a big country station I didn't even know existed.
From that point on, I stopped trying to connect the universe to the track. The only thing that connects the universe and the track is that I don't understand either of them. So let's just do what we like and not do what we don't like. This is the way I spend my life, and by extension, the tracks on FMT.
COMPOSITION: QUINTUPLETS AND "B-SYMMETRY"
(TM writes:)
The most significant element in this particular track is quintuplets, I think. Using the kick drum on the first and third notes out of five in a beat sounds like a swing… swing but as if it were polyrhythm. It generates a very unique and fierce groove.
Later, the first- and forth-notes kick drums are used. Even more interestingly to me, that is a unique feature which quintuplets have in particular. It shows a completely different groove but still swings. It’s like dodging or fooling us. When you put two notes within one beat, there are only three ways of combination in triplets and six in quadruplets, but you have 24 options in quintuplets. There are, thus, various ways of making groove with quintuplets, and that is very interesting and at the same time unstable.
There is no pure bass, but, instead, the sine wave plays the role of on-beat guidance as virtually no one (including me as one listener, of course) is used to quintuplet rhythms. It sounds in dyads on the beat, like the augmented 4th for Beat 1 and the perfect 4th for Beat 2 going to the major-3rd higher augmented 4th for Beat 3 and the perfect 4th for Beat 4. Stability and at the same time instability.
The second motif is a basic pattern that has quintuplets for the first two beats, sextuplets for the next two, quintuplets for two again, and quadruplets for two. The question here is “what the combination of quintuplets and other commonly used multiples is like?”
Here in the second motif, there is another equivalently important idea. As composition on the notation is what I see as one of FMT’s most symbolic, the manner of writing this second motif is very characteristic of the notation composition, which I call "Code Music."
The tentative title was “B Symmetry.” With the axis on the central line of B, it’s designed as a vertical symmetry. It’s just like vertically rotating Uranus, I reckoned.
But these motifs are just "fragmented tones" and hardly formed into connected sequences, in another word, "phrases." For this TI supplemented ones nicely.
(TI writes:)
Musically I tried to put a sophisticated, abstract, instrumental section on top of an indigenous sound, an African-inspired beat.
The harmonies were mainly created by TM, but on top of that I put some structural, sustained harmonies. On the other hand, I made the melody simple and unnatural, with poorly written phrases that do not match the harmony at all. I also created a jarring counter-melody centered on the major 3rd and augmented 4th.
PROGRAMMING
In addition to the MuseScore score data, I added some MIDI events to the synth part. So far, I've tried to minimize the use of MIDI events such as volume velocity and bend information, but in this case, I wanted to create a phrase that sounds like a chordal croak, so I've added detailed MIDI event pitch information to the synth part. This sound is what I was inspired by the pad in "Shadows On The Ground" from Yellow Magic Orchestra's album "Service".
The reason why I didn't want to use MIDI events is that I often have to change the voices many times during the recording process, and the voices sound different, so I have to change the event values each time, and it can slow down the DAW and cause errors.
MIXING
I tried to create and mix old movie-style sounds and digital sounds together. It's like having a mess of old tin toys and Nintendo Switch in a toy box.
I used a lot of sample sounds from acoustic instruments, but I aimed for an artificial and unnatural sounding effect. I used effects like Bit Crusher, which creates digital distortion, and Vynal from izotope, an effect that destabilizes the pitch. It's a live instrument, but it's not a simulation of a live performance; it's more of a sound extraction.
The drum sounds started out clear and high fidelity, but I replaced the bass drum, snare drum, and percussion with a low quality soundfont that I'm using in MuseScore. The drums were lo-fi or "bad sounding" to begin with, so I didn't use any effectors. The reverb on the snare was originally attached to the tone itself. However, all of the sounds have long releases, and the sounds interfere with each other, so I cut out the releases in detail.
Comments