Westbound Propagations
Notes On "WESTBOUND PROPAGATIONS"
TRACK DATA
Composition tool: MuseScore, Studio One 5 Professional
Recording tool (DAW): Studio One 5 Professional
Number of tracks: 135
Sound source: Presence XT, Impact XT, Mai-Tai, Mojito (All built-in sound sources of Studio One), TAL-NOIZEMAKER
Composition and Recording period: Nov 29 2021 - Mar 31 2022
Concept: Ambiguous key and dominant note
(TM writes:)
In this track we have done a lot of complex things, trying not to show it's complex.
The tentative title during the production processes was "Hypophrygian", meaning the Hypophrygian mode. Although I skip its definition, the mode is the "under-Phrygian" mode built in ancient Greece and used in, for instance, Gregorian Chant.
Very often I use the Phrygian and Hypophrygian modes, just because I love the sound and Gregorian Chant. Today, nonetheless, there is only a few musicians appear to use either of them world-wide, but they are so attractive. Gregorian Chant is, just in case you don't know, an ancient music sung in Christianity churches. Phrygia, which the Greek named the modes, is a country that existed in current Turkey approximately 3,000 years ago.
I have a reason to use them frequently: not only the attractiveness, but also the feature that they sound very "ambiguous" to those who are familiar with today's music. One of the main reason for it is that the dominant note is not included, for example, G in C major. These archaic modes have G-flat as the fifth note from the key of C. (Moreover, Phrygian has E rather than F as the fourth, subdominant.)
Even more often, FMT make atonal music without the clear key. What happens if such music uses the Hypophrygian mode? Although the track "Westbound Propagations" basically follows C Hypophrygian, it does not present the first key of C obviously. Our purpose of that is to generate unique beauty... or some particular charm in the atonality, which is quite often just creepy.
Composition: Complex but not seemingly so
(TM writes:)
In the introduction of the track mainly five notes are used within C Hypophrygian: D-flat, E-flat, G-flat, A-flat and B-flat. Only sometimes C is. After that introduction the combination of a ascending dyad phrase and its counter-phrase that descends. In the old time, Phrygian was used for ascending phrases, while Hypophrygian for descending ones. Here, it's downside up, and the counter-phrase or "mirror"-phrase supplemented or decorated by TI pursues neither Phrygian nor Hypophrygian.
Two bars later C Hypophrygian (scale here) shifts to its 6th mode and then to the 7th mode. About 20 bars later it goes to D Hypophrygian with the ambiguous key. From the 51th bar the scale is altered to an unnamed scale.
That's just a part of the complex things, with which we try not to show it's complex, as I write at the top above. TI and I attempted various designs, many of which are common with the other tracks in this "The Anomalous Folk" series, and I talk about them in the notes on the other pieces. Please see also those if you are interested.
(TI writes:)
For this piece, I used the compositional technique as it is as a technique; I broke down and organised the phrases TM had written into monophonic melodies, then wrote faithfully antiphonal phrases, and otherwise added a new synth-noise part in the middle section. In a way, it was like adding shadows to his drawings.
In addition, TM's scores often have a large number of simultaneous sounds per part, and the registers are often far apart, so it is necessary to divide the parts again for each register (it would be difficult to mix without doing this). Instruments such as piano and guitar, which have a relatively wide range and whose sounds are gathered in one part to create a characteristic sound, are of course left as they are, but for instruments such as strings and brass, it is impossible to actually cover their wide range with a single instrument, and there are limits to the number of simultaneous There is also a limit to the number of simultaneous sounds.
Also, these instruments have different roles in the mix in the upper, middle and lower registers, so they need to be broken down once.
In doing so, various phrases and harmonies may be discovered within the collection of sounds, and it is necessary to divide the parts and create tones that make the most of this.
Discovering phrases and harmonies within this collection of sounds is extremely enjoyable.
[On sound creation and mixing/at the Studio One phase]
"Far from tonal but not muddy"
Throughout the series, I try to create a relatively low-fi sound by expanding the mid-range (around 500 Hz to 1 kHz). This follows the sound creation of "Here I am" and "The Beginnings", one of the prototypes of the series.
For this song, too, I used the SoundFont tones used in Musescore as they are, and in some parts, I took the sounds from Musescore and used them as they are. For example, in this song, the drums and percussion are taken from a WavFile export of the Musescore performance.
However, if you play the same sound all the way through, it sounds flat, so I've made various changes along the way, such as replacing some parts with those played by Bit Crusher, shifting the localisation and so on.
The intention of breaking down each part of Musescore into single melodies as much as possible and separating each into individual tracks is to have the advantage of not muddying the sound (to control the muddiness) at the time of mixing.
For example, if sounds that are stuck in a close range (often considered dissonant) are put together as they are on a single track and effects are put together, the sound can become very muddy. This is particularly noticeable with reverb, delay and other reverberation effects.
In such cases, separate the tracks, reduce the degree to which each reverberation effect is applied, especially the width of the localisation, and shift them slightly. This will ensure that the sound is less muddy than intended.
In particular, recent reverberation effects that are considered 'good sounding' generally have a wide range of localisation. Such effects often sound very good when only a single track is monitored in the mix, but when all the parts are played at once, they often become incomprehensible.
In such cases, it is much better to narrow the localisation of the effect's components (make it mono), pinpoint their localisation, combine them on each track and determine the overall localisation.
There are modern plug-ins that can easily balance localisation, but they generally balance in the direction of 'widening'. The trend in music these days is to reduce the number of notes, to widen a single note and increase its presence, but using those effects in that way makes our music sound unlistenable.
Our sound is far from tonal, but it doesn't sound (to us) so muddy. That's partly because we control the acoustic.
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