This was a group project, developed in partnership with Ada Wagner and Jana Hartmann. As part of a transdisciplinary international summer school, we were given a traditional Lithuanian choir song to work with. Our project takes a critical look at the gender dynamics in the song and the ambiguity in the symbolism of the rue flower. With the sound composition, I aimed to represent its duality of meaning and push it to more dramatic limits.
This composition began as an exercise in which I was meant to use exclusively granular synthesis techniques. The effect I built was quite simple, but playing around with a few parameters while adapting to different sounds resulted in rich outputs that blended quite well together. I started with a chord progression on the guitar as a base and expanded from there, adding voice, assorted percussions (a.k.a. my coffee mug and a spoon) and some recorded samples.
This was an exploration of beat frequencies and the musical potential of basic operations with simple wave shapes. It’s fun to think about sound mathematically, as nothing more than a function over time. In fact, in the digital domain, that’s all it is, really, and it’s always surprising how much we can get just from moving those numbers around. The results are often very mechanical, but interesting nonetheless.
Zosma was a transmedia project that involved music production, sound design, performance, narrative and a few other things. The whole concept revolved around an alien race that wanted to form a 'human music' band. The sound design part involved a lot of unconventional ways to achieve somewhat familiar results, specifically with bass and guitar tones.
As a time-hungry and all-consuming hobby, chess was bound to find its way into the rest of what I do, so it became the focus of this generative and interactive music project. Chess-based music is not any kind of novel idea, but I felt I needed to materialise my own interpretation. I aimed for something that could convey what’s happening on the chess board in an explicit yet subtle way and that could be heard for a long time without getting too annoying.
