New Blog

All further posts will be at http://lukecape.blogspot.com.

That is all.

Electro-acoustic composition: Impressions (8'25)

A composition from my final portfolio for uni.

"This piece explores field recordings made during travels in West Africa during summer 2008, and my initial impressions of some of the places we visited. It evolves in chronological order from the beaches of northern Morocco to the oases and mosques of the southern Sahara."

Click to listen (Mp3, 11.6mb, 8'25mins)

Some of the field recordings used in the piece can be found on my Freesound page.

June Happenings

Since uni finished two weeks ago, I've been hanging around between Donegal, Belfast and Dublin. Not all that much happening, but there have been a couple of things interesting recently.

Last week, I helped out Rui Chaves with part of his independent study for his MA. 5 of us went up into the top 5 floors of the old library tower in Queen's and switched on and off lights along the rows of books (14 on each floor), according to a timed score. Rui's going to use parts of it as an accompaniment to one of his compositions, which should be cool.

Here's a video of us in the library.

Link


This week I was out getting some field recordings as a favour for an American composer, Robert Scott Thompson, who had contacted me via Freesound.org asking for sounds from the Belfast/Antrim area. I got some nice sounds from a small bird colony out on Belfast Lough at 6am, caves in Whitehead and some alright ones from City Centre. He's going to develop them into a Belfast-themed composition. I'll eventually get some of the sounds up on Radio Aporee.

I was in Dublin on Sunday all day loading out equipment from the Take That circus tour. It was a massive operation - 96 of us local crew, about 50 senior crew, 34 trucks full of equipment and a stage which stretched half the length of Croke Park. They would have grossed about €4,200,000 from ONE night's show (70,000 people at €60 a ticket), which took three days to set up and two to take down. Must get myself into a boyband.

Going to Slovenia tomorrow for 10 days, then back for a couple of days, after which i'm heading to the Pennines for a weekend before heading back to Belfast for graduation on the 8th July. Then I'll be looking for a job / roadtripping / getting stuck in to rugby pre-season / working at festivals / developing my Max/MSP skills / gigging with bands here and there etc. I just hope the weather stays good.

Waiting at the Edge of Nowhere

For the past 3 weeks I've been hanging out with Dramatic people doing dramatic things. We put on a production that has been described as 'Weird', 'Short' and 'Crazy' by various people, amongst other things.

Waiting at the Edge of Nowhere is a play following three different storylines - that of an argumentative couple on the cusp of a big decision, that of a blind man attempting to recall an accident he witnessed through sounds, smells and tastes he felt at the time, and that of a group of schoolkids on the verge of breaking the law for the first time...

Part of the Finale - includes pyroteknix!!

Press release <- This may help make a little more sense of it!

It was a really rushed production - we devised it, wrote it, choreographed it and composed for it in only 2 weeks, and then had a further 3 days rehearsals before the show dates, which were the 10th, 11th and 12th of February. Good fun though. Myself and Gerard Haughian made the music and sound design for the show. We used a lot of Foley in our creation of the sounds - the actors brought in found objects that they felt reflected their mood/gestures/text in a scene, and we made it into 'music'. Some of the music was created live each night using Max/MSP loops and others were cued from the director's box. Sophy Smith was our musical director, Stevie Prickett directed, and additional writing was by James Johnson



Max/MSP patch for warping sounds live, used in rehearsals mainly to come up with content on-demand

Comparing auditory lateralization over near-field loudspeakers and headphones

My final psychoacoustics project had to be an experiment or study of some sort.

I compared people's accuracy in localizing sound on headphones and loudspeakers. Pretty straightforward, but the results were a bit crazy!

Lateralization while using headphones is more accurate than using loudspeakers? Just about, apparently!

Human listeners are capable of locating a sound source in the environment very precisely. For sounds on the frontal horizontal plane (right-left in front of the head) interaural time differences (I.T.D.s) between the two ears are the major cue in lateralization below 1500Hz, while interaural level differences (I.L.D.s) are how we better localize sounds above this frequency band. [7]

In my study, I am comparing people’s ability to lateralize (or ‘place’) sounds in a free-field situation (listening over loudspeakers) with a ‘closed’ situation (listening using close-backed headphones).

Many studies have been made into lateralization of sounds with I.T.D. and I.L.D. using headphones as a sound emitting device [1] [3] [4]. Studies have also been made into lateralization of sounds using loudspeakers [5] [6], but there haven’t been collaberative studies which compare the lateralization cues of both headphones and loudspeakers using clicks as auditory stimuli.

Experiment Report <- Download from ZShare

Recording Sage

For my final recording project, I recorded Belfast's finest (probably only) Psychadelic/Progressive Rock band Sage.

I only had to record one song, but it turned out to be a real epic session, with over 50 tracks once all the overdubs and retakes were done.

We Are Believers (mp3, 9 minutes 47secs, 13.5MB)

Feedback from my lecturer who graded it noted that "the drum sound is good but a bit ‘enclosed’ " and that the "frequency response of the mix as a whole was still quite LF/MF dominant and slightly lacking in top end", which were two good points.

I also thought my mixing of the vocals was a bit shit too - I was going for the thinned out EQ and processed sound of eg. Maynard James Keenan but really didn't get anywhere near it - vox were recorded the day before submission, so they were a bit rushed!

Fragments

My first serious attempt at composing electroacoustically.

Listen here (mp3, 6 minutes, 8.2MB)

"This sketch is composed of scenarios from the soundworld of sleep. It follows the cycle of the Sleeper from a state of conciousness to unconciousness and deep sleep. Along the journey the Listener encounters fragments – states of mind - ranging from inertia to agitation to unease, before the confusing state of mind encountered on awakening."


Mixing fragments in Logic - panning automation all over the shop!

Analysis Project

Analysing the frequency components of a wasp, and resynthesizing a small wasp army from this analysis - all in a days work in SARC!

Triad Tutor

We had to create an 'Interactive music-related program' in Processing - an open-source programming language similar to Java, but in baby-form - that made use of what we had already done in tutorials, namely Arrays, Object Orientated Programming and using Processing's library plug-in thingies.



I decided to make a program that teaches kids how to build triads in Music. It requires a knowledge of notes in relation to the keyboard, but apart from that is simple enough.

Play it online! (Note - this webpage is really slow for some reason)

Sound Design project

One of my three Winter projects was for Sound Design. We were given a 5 minute clip of Tarkovsky's Mirror and had to create sound effects, ambience etc. I went for a surreal vs. real theme (not sure what that is), and this is what I came up with:

(listen to with headphones or good speakers if poss, and preferably in a darkened room)


I used ProTools (we had to), but mostly used SoundHack for convolution and effects - it produces amazing quality sound files - and Audacity for editing. I enjoyed it.