I did a song!

This semester I gave myself the challenge of being in an electronic music class and a speculative fiction writing class. Basically, my homework was creating music and writing short stories (plus essays for other classes and thesis research of course). It's been a pretty cool experience to be semi-forced into being creative, especially since I really enjoy being creative and plan on a career where being creative is useful! I wrote about this before, it'd make me happy if you read it!

I still need to do edits before any of my stories would be ready to post, but I figured I'd post my final project for electronic music. If you're interested in the process of creating it, I've written it out, but it you're uninterested in that part and just want to listen to it, that's totally alright. I used Logic Pro X.

Tea Kettle Worlds

I wanted to create a song that had an overlaying beginning and ending of my water kettle (recorded in my room). From there, I changed the EQ wavelengths to sections of the water kettle so that the changes would prevent the kettle from completely disappearing into while white noise, while still fulfilling that white noise type of situation. I had to create 10 separate tracks so that I could change the EQ on each of them, but I left the intro and outro to me unaffected.

I then added a little intro and outro incorporating the click of the kettle with a heartbeat, a metronome ticking sound during the first measure, and a clip of birdcalls (recorded outside of Caples) at the end.

Within that, I wanted to see a variety of music worlds explored. I created 4 mini songs with apple loops, which I’ve named Walk, Bounce, Glide, and Stomp.

The Beginning

• Walk is an easygoing bass-y tune that’s repetitive and fun.
• From there, we go into Bounce, which is a fuller tune with more moving parts and more of a dance-y vibe, or at least, the little bounce one does when someone is into a piece but not fully dancing yet.

Bounce

• Glide follows with another shorter chill vibe. I particularly liked the names of the apple loops here (Shining Star Electric Piano, Pocket Groove Bass, and Coffee Shop Guitar) and even though I recognize the unimportance of the names, I feel like they all fit together well. I also added a fade-out at the end of this section, because I felt like it needed it more than some of the other sections.

• Then we finish with Stomp, which is like a cross between intense club music and the music alternative percussion groups create.  

Stomp

Between each section there’s a pause where only water kettle is heard, and since both Bounce and Stomp were at a slower tempo, I used that measure to be able to gradually decrease or increase the tempo in order for the different pieces to work together.

When all is said and done, the water and music ends and you hear birds. It’s as if you turned on the kettle, a million things happened while you were waiting, and then when the water is finally ready for your cup of tea, you get to walk out into the calm of nature.

Here it is!