I think I forgot about the middle part of this assignment, which was to have a middle part that was ambiguous between significant and decorative…Anyway, the inspiration for this week’s Disquiet Junto assignment was a quote from Berio on Bach, so I decided to make this, spiritually, Baroque. I grabbed some lyrics from my “random lyrics” notebook, wrote down a short melody, and then tackled the “decorative” portion.
In my head, the melody would play with random, randomized, but melodic, interruptions from various plug-ins…but I couldn’t get the plug-in chain to generate melodies on single words. In Ableton, I sliced the audio recording of my singing into a sampler, but the randomization plug-ins ended up being much more percussive than melodic.
So, at the last minute, I decided to take the samples of my melody and “play” them using a MIDI keyboard. I did three takes, one in which I used a piano sound, one in which I used the vocal samples, and one in which I let myself hear both the piano and vocal sounds. This last method worked the best, so I kept that. Overall, I like this version a lot better.
I edited the improvisation a little bit and added some long tones underneath (down-pitched and timestretched recording of the melody).
Lyrics:
The chess tutor
He speaks of sunlight and snakes
His sentences spiral
into footnotes from which
he rarely emerges