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R-Space Talk Transcript

This is a transcript of a talk giving at R-Space Gallery in Lisburn on the 10th October 2013 at part of Firing Sound with ceramicist Andrew Cooke.

I thought it would be a good idea to put the transcript on my blog so that anyone who wanted could read and listen again. What follows is my pre-written talk that I know I digressed from a few times during the course of the presentation (I can’t remember where, what and how though!) but it includes all the main points I wanted to cover. Throughout it I’ve embedded the sound examples I played and at the bottom is a playlist of my other music. If you have any questions feel free to comment below or email me at mwhiteside(at)me(dot)com. Replace (at) for @ and (dot) for .

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/91241864″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

I’m Matthew Whiteside and I’m the composer involved with the current exhibition in here. I’ve been asked to give this talk as a bit of an introduction to me as a composer and also to talk about the new piece, Elements, composed for the exhibition, however I’ll come onto that later. You’ve just heard my most recently premiered instrumental piece called Well, Well, Well.

I started with it because it is a good summary of where I am sitting at the moment as a composer. Throughout and after my studies I’ve been interested in drawing together quite separate influences. The main ones are contemporary electronic music, classical music, physics and rock. I didn’t quite plan on bringing rock into my compositions but it has been there from the start because that’s what I listened to a lot when I was younger. The physics side of it has also been there since the start specifically the beating effect you get with two notes not perfectly in tune.

Now for some more music.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/114890713″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

This is an extract of what I would call my very first piece, Quartet No. 1.

In this you can hear the same effect being used at the start with the two violins. I have used this effect in a number of pieces but for a while was searching to find ways to emphasize it. This led me to start exploring the use of electronics. At Queen’s, where I did my undergraduate, they have a whole department dedicated to audio technology and a room called the Sonic Lab with speakers placed around the whole room. It places you in the middle of the sound. If you get a chance go along to one of their lunchtime concerts they are free and open to the public.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/114890034″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

That was an extract of Machinisit’s Visual Fallacy. It was my first electroacoustic piece. Within this extract I used a similar technique to the strings but because it is composed in the studio I had a lot more control over it.

The basic idea of this style of music is to take real world sounds and build a piece using the sounds as they are or manipulate them using studio technology. The other way I quite like to think about it is using the speaker as a veil to create visual audio. In other words you hear a sound that is instantly recognizable such as a door closing. The sound carries certain information with it meaning you can hear the space the door is in you can tell if the door is wood or metal and how big it is  you might even remember a door from your childhood that sounded the same basically you can almost see it in your mind but you can’t see anything with your eyes. These are some of the techniques I used in composing Elements and continue to use throughout my work. Sometimes a climax results in lifting the veil of the speaker to revel the image behind or soundscape is created that could almost be real but there’s something not quite right niggling at the back of your mind.

Though these two pieces are about 3 or 4 years old they are still influencing what I do now.

The next piece I’m going to talk about is my Quartet No. 3 for string quartet and live electronics. This piece pulls together quite overtly all my influences in the first few seconds.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/114890285″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

What you are hearing is a string quartet played live but also being sampled and manipulated live to create a ‘glitchy tension’ This phrase is in reference to a specific genre of music that uses scrapes and glitches (like a cd skipping) as the main musical material. The close microtonal interactions between the notes also add to this sense of something not quite right in the music to keep it driving forward. Incidentally this piece is being played in its entirety as part of the Belfast festival on the 26th October at 7.30pm in the Crescent Arts Centre. You can find out more information about the concert on the Belfast Festival website.

Now that I’ve given you a brief overview of my interests as a composer and what I’ve done I’m going to talk a bit more in depth about the R-Space commission.

Before composing the piece I knew I wanted it to be an aural interaction between Andrew Cooke’s practice and the building where the exhibition was going to take place. To do that I went to Andrew’s workspace to record the sounds of him working and anything else I found interesting. I also spent a few hours walking around r-space tapping, scrapping and hitting things to record various sounds in and around the building.

After this I had about 5 hours work of audio to listen through to and pick out interesting sounds. Here are a few examples.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/10786073″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]

I found it quite difficult to get into the piece and work out what I wanted it to do. I initially thought of having multiple sonic images and create an aural walk round a gallery but the source material didn’t lend itself to that no matter how much I tried. Then while I was cycling around Glasgow I had the idea to develop the sonic images into the 4 elements earth, wind, fire and water. I decided to divide the recorded sounds by various properties. Earth used sounds that were earthy such as gravel, scrapping the sounds of sticks, very natural sounds. Fire was sounds created by metal, glass or things that needed fire to have been made. Water referred to digging or machinery, basically sounds of things changing or moving. While Air I took to mean music or sounds that wouldn’t have been possible without all of the others combined.

I then took these 4 groups of material and started composing the 4 different sections. Here is an early version of Water.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/114892258″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Ultimately I wanted to make sure the whole piece fitted together as one entity rather than 4 sections. This meant that quite a lot of cross-pollination between the sections to smooth the edges.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/110803784″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

The final thing I want to talk about today is about the jeweler you see in the glass cabinet. A number of years ago I took up oil painting and I was interested in trying to represent the beat patterns I talked about earlier in paint. Initially I did this through brushstrokes on monochrome canvas but eventually it developed into what you see behind me. I then thought it would be a really interesting idea to try and create things based on a more scientific analysis of sound.

chimes2

Robert introduced me to Sarah McAleer who is a jewelry smith with a 3d printer and we developed a way to translate this flat image into a 3D model in the computer. This model could then be understood by her printer and made into a real life thing. Because Sarah is interested in developing new types of jewelery she then began twisting these into bracelets and rings creating these.

Chimes 3D Render

We are really excited about these because we don’t know of anyone else in the world that is doing anything quite like it. It also has the possibility of being a really personal piece of jewelry by recording someones voice, their child playing or a couple saying ‘I do’ and making it into a ring or a pendant. We have also been talking to Andrew Cooke about incorporating ceramics into the products as well and making it a really broad collaboration. At the moment we are in the initial stages of developing it but we all think there is a huge opportunity if we can market it right.

Thank you for listening and I hope you’ve enjoyed finding out a bit more about me, my music and my interests. If you have any questions please feel free to ask and I’ve got a CD on sale, which has both Elements, and Machinist’s Visual Fallacy on with a few other pieces.

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/playlists/424172″ params=”” width=” 100%” height=”450″ iframe=”true” /]

1 thought on “R-Space Talk Transcript”

  1. Pingback: Summary of 2013 | Matthew Whiteside

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