Music Technology

Roger Sesena Mirada, BA (Hons) Electronic Music Production, embarked on an ambitious project as part of the Creative Collaboration module. He project managed 15 collaborators ranging from drone pilots through to dancers, cinematographers, directors and other students from the BA (Hons) Electronic Music Production course. The result is music video about a dancer who feels lonely and depressed. As the music video progresses, she is having some flashbacks of when she danced with other people, and she felt happy and complete.

Roger says, 'I want to thank the entire team at the University for encouraging us to carry out an assessment as important to our artistic development as this one. I believe nowadays, one of the most important talents is knowing how to select the people with whom you are going to work and lead the team so that each member contributes additional value to the project.'

Mark Parmiter, BA (Hons) Music Technology, says, "The aim of this project was to create a high-quality virtual instrument from a Bechstein A1 grand piano using Kontakt 6. This project was chosen largely because of my personal connection to the piano itself; a relative’s piano and the first instrument I ever learnt to play, making it one of the first introductions I had to playing and creating music. With this in mind, and with the world becoming increasingly tech based, I wanted to have a virtual copy of this instrument that could be preserved perhaps even longer than the instrument itself. I also wanted easier access to the piano for use in compositions.

The process involved recording the piano with professional microphones and techniques, editing these recordings down carefully to singular notes, and finally building the instrument itself using Native Instruments’ Kontakt 6 software."

Bradley Palmer's (BA (Hons) Music Technology) Major Project looks at 'Constructing a Hybridised Production Style: The Sonic Aesthetic of 1970’s Soft Rock Explored Using Contemporary Production Techniques.’

Bradley says, ‘The aim of this project was to construct a hybridised production style by fusing the sonic aesthetic of 1970s Soft Rock with contemporary standards of clarity, punch and sonic interest.

Focusing on the deadened ‘warmth’ of artists such as Eagles and Fleetwood Mac, I undertook research on salient practitioners to uncover the era-specific production techniques responsible for such revered tones

Sophie Bowler, BMus (Hons) Songwriting and Recording, known as Sophie Marie when working as a top-line vocalist, embarked on a project that explores various collaborative methods, to discover which techniques are the most productive within the EDM community and to establish the best working environments for a producer and top-liner collaboration.

She created a six track EP working with six different producers from around the world including Miami, Belgium and London. Sophie utilised new collaborative apps, such as Vampr, to allow remote collaborations to be easily accessible during the COVID 19 pandemic, whilst allowing her musical knowledge and skills to continuously grow.

Listen to Sophie's work on Spotify:

• All For You
• Feeling It

Affectionately known as the “ambient boy from Singapore”, Kin Leonn, BA (Hons) Recording, Mixing and Production, is an artist, composer and producer currently based in London. His transportive work as founding member of electronic act ‘midst’, as well as his solo releases on the highly-regarded KITCHEN. LABEL have established him as an exciting, versatile presence within Singapore’s thriving underground.

"This study investigates particular technical devices that can help produce a dimensional and focal quality in musical composition. The academic research is supported by a body of musical pieces and photographs that put into practice the theoretical discoveries. Research findings revealed that particular musical devices channel a sense of blur and depth in compositions by seminal 20th-century figures. This study analyses and discusses these and puts the knowledge into practice through an artefact containing a set of four original pieces which incorporate the different techniques used by the studied composers, creating innovative notions of musical depth and blur. Some of the devices explored to achieve the intended outcome comprise removing bar lines, creating blurry textures by adding tremolo and trills to the strings and woodwinds, doubling instrument layers, adding reverberation and delay, and creating a dynamics gradient reflective of the pitches in the audio spectrum."

Heuristic Inquiry: Composing Electronic Music for Neurofeedback using Ableton Live.

"This study aims to explore and understand how electronic music can aid with common ailments such as stress, anxiety, and depression. It is widely known that if these issues are left untreated it can be detrimental to the affected person in their everyday life and at worst, the outcome can be fatal. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), suicide is the fourth leading cause of death among people aged between 15 to 29 years (World Health Organisation, 2021). This study is concerned with taking preventative measures and empowering people to learn more about how to practice mental well-being and promote good mental hygiene."

Texture and Temporality in Music.

"In the context of this project, I analyse how music can create the sense of temporalities and time through developments in texture. This research project focusses on how three 21st-Century Icelandic media composers, Johann Johannsson, Hildur Guðnadóttir and Olafur Arnalds, create contrasting temporalities through their use of textural variation to create motion and stasis, thereby “sounding motion in temporal space” (Reinhold, 1954, p. 167). Particularly, they focus on the density of the music (the way in which it is layered) and the timbres of instruments and sounds that they use. They manage, through skilful use of devices associated with these two facets of music, to create a sense of movement and stasis within a given piece. These stimuli within the music influence the listener’s conscious perception of time and create new ideas of temporality for the listener; “conscious states, under the influence of the stimuli that come to it from the outside world” (Baggech and Messiaen, 1998, p.31)".

A Practice Based Approach to Understanding 80s Pop Production.

"Pop music of the 1980s has such a distinct and recognisable sound that it is often used to sum up the sound of the ‘80s in general. The reification of an entire decade’s musical output into a small number of recognisable sonic signifiers is a consequence of a musical and political climate that saw rapid change and development in the early 1980s. This presents an opportunity to research the hidden or covert factors that may have influenced this sound, and explore how the structure and agency of macro-level influences regulate and determine aesthetic choices that contribute to the association between music and era. By combining practice and research, this project has illuminated a number of ways in which production workflows, emerging technologies and cultural outlook manifested in the pop music of the 1980s to create a distinct and recognisable sound that, to this day, remains evocative of the era."

"To understand to what extent timbre has an emotional effect on sound art compositions, this research utilises a practice-based approach. A preliminary study, as well as further research and development, provided a base understanding of the relationship between timbre, emotion, and sound art so that the creation of the artefact would be well-informed. The artefact created is entitled ‘Grief’, and it consists of five sound-art compositions that represent each of the five stages of the grieving process: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. These pieces have carefully selected timbral elements to display how different timbres result in different emotional outputs. This practice has shown that the extent to which timbre affects a sound-art piece is not necessarily definitive but rather it showcases a need for reflective examination of one’s practice to make tacit knowledge connections about their art that can elevate their practice over time. Additionally, this research has shown the importance of experimentation in practice-based research to fully examine the breadth of possibility that comes with analysing creative-arts practice."

Folly den Toom, MA Record Production - Organic Overdubbing & The NEDMOOT Method.

Folly says, “Motivated by growing personal frustrations with the (depending on the genre) unbefitting sound of recordings entirely constructed from overdubs, I decided to investigate how I could make non-linear performances sound more ‘organic’. By ‘organic’ I am referring to the mysterious variables that constitute the unmistakable sound of records from a bygone era, in particular records from the 1970s. Although overdubbing was already standard practice by this time, recordings were often constructed on top of a basic Rubato performance, which in fact featured multiple agents interacting.'

'Overall, my research project showed me that there is much more to group interaction than just discrepancies in timing and tempo, aspects I initially focused on given the widespread use of click tracks for overdubbing today. Given its inductive nature, the research didn’t lead to any definitive results regarding how to replicate the sound of a group performance. Notwithstanding, it did produce interesting results and concepts that are useful for my own practice going forward, and have inspired further investigation in future research.”

Instagram |  Low Road Studios

Texture and Temporality in Music.

"In the context of this project, I analyse how music can create the sense of temporalities and time through developments in texture. This research project focusses on how three 21st-Century Icelandic media composers, Johann Johannsson, Hildur Guðnadóttir and Olafur Arnalds, create contrasting temporalities through their use of textural variation to create motion and stasis, thereby “sounding motion in temporal space” (Reinhold, 1954, p. 167). Particularly, they focus on the density of the music (the way in which it is layered) and the timbres of instruments and sounds that they use. They manage, through skilful use of devices associated with these two facets of music, to create a sense of movement and stasis within a given piece. These stimuli within the music influence the listener’s conscious perception of time and create new ideas of temporality for the listener; “conscious states, under the influence of the stimuli that come to it from the outside world” (Baggech and Messiaen, 1998, p.31)"