To talk about these tracks separately might have helped the curious see the explorations that I have achieved through Adobe Premiere Pro and the simple interface and mechanics of nesting and layering. Alas, I don’t take great notes and tend to get excited and improvise and impulsively copy and paste, making the process obscured by randomness.

With these videos, I’m doing visual and audio explorations. Techniques with visual: turbulence, distort, tint, contrast and brightness, magnify, and blending modes. In most of them, I repeat a one minute video.

Audio explorations: I use field recordings (using a binaural microphone mostly, but there’s a hydrophone–mono that I also use). I worked with performers: David Samas, Dani Robison, Cory Harrison to get some sounds from real instruments in less controlled environments (there’s a bird or two in the tracks). I also play a few. In this playlist, there is a calimba, glass harp, double bass, clarinet, xylophone, and piano. There are tracks with rain, water, and rattle sounds. There’s one track with soft-spoken gibberish and another with singing gibberish.

For the distortion of the tracks. Some sounds are slowed down (never sped up). Some when I slow them down I maintain the pitch. Some of the clips are clipped down to a single note (or phoneme) and others I let go and you hear more of the improvisation of the performers.

Planning, I generally have an idea of what I want to find out. No, sometimes, I just like surprising myself. I recently had a composing lesson that covered cypher notation using numbers (used in gamelan, but other things too, I imagine). It makes sense for me because I’m really unconcerned with pitch at this point and just want to create intervals. Also it’s way easier to read, write, and translate than dots on lines. In some of the tracks, one can hear the four bars of four counts. With three others doing half notes and then whole notes (or whatever, just the idea of different paces).

I found that: it feels more coherent when I use fewer instruments and when I map out how the track will go on paper before opening the app, I’m more ready to decide something is done than slapping on other stuff. I think the star of this playlist is the glass harp. The notes are sustained in such a way that create a limitlessness to it. Unlike percussion that is hit, or wind instruments, the glass harp (with two hands and some water) can be sustained for longer with a same volume. There’s a beating that I find irresistible and organic.