KABOOM

My song KABOOM was done on Ableton 10 Live, a software that can be used with an MPK Mini Controller to manipulate pitch and duration of notes. I didn’t want to use Noteflight because I felt it wouldn’t have achieved the atmospheric energy I aspired to create. My goal for this project was to simply close my eyes and recreate the sounds I heard on my walk by the Water Shed. All the different instruments in the song reflect the different elements I heard and experienced that day. As much as climate change is important, I wanted to convey the serenity and peace nature can bring one person. Nature is crucial in transcendence, as well as music. We are going to lose transcendence.

I chose the name KABOOM, because I didn’t have time to pick another name and I thought it suited the concept. The world is going to go KABOOM. That is what climate change is doing to the earth. Making weather super-hot and extreme because of capitalism…

The start of the song was meant to be softer and more atmospheric but ended up being an intro for a Mac Miller song. I really enjoy it. The instrumentation and percussion are just perfect if I knew how to rap. I thought the electric piano, aptly named “Soft Morning” harmonized with “The Sun” and “The Wind”, like when you walk in the morning while the sun is coming up. I wanted these electric sounds to imitate real world nature sounds.

I wanted the wind to be heard throughout the piece, as well as the sun, and footsteps during the water shed. A lot of the sounds you can hear are labelled as such in the program, and I wanted them to move. I wanted the wind to come and go, as well as the sun because I wanted it to be hidden by the clouds. My first rendition was in a sense polyphonic, because everything was not mixed and related so it sounded terrible. One aspect that changed was the timbre and tone of the piece. I removed some instruments and added others depending on the timing and emotional aura of the piece. The kick drum was meant to be a heartbeat, but also the percussion in general was meant to be footsteps. The midi was really interesting to use visually and aurally. Percussion is seen as separate from sounds in general, because human beings compared to nature are not natural. We are the reason climate change is happening, and we are the problem. Pitch-wise, I wanted something along the lines of the Twin Peaks Theme written by recently passed Angelo Badalamenti. It was said that the heart of Twin Peaks was the music, and I feel that can be said about life. Both are written in E Lydian Mode, with the only difference being that Badalamenti switches into an A Minor and F Major. If I had more time, I would have construed key changes depending on the time and emotion. Writing in E Lydian mode was difficult for when I wanted to create Midi art, which is towards the end and the latter half of the piece. They are very jarring chord-wise simply because of the nature of the mode, and the first is meant to resemble a sun. It’s written in the instrument The Sun, which I think is just an electric piano with minor changes.  The ending to the song is meant to say “HEAVEN” in chords and is meant to show death and finality in our mistakes and accomplishments.

As much as I wish that I could have worked on it more, I’m pretty satisfied with the product given I learned a music program in a few days. Record time! I also learned how to mix instruments to create different tones of the piece and change the instrumentation simply by snipping it out or changing how it comes into headphones, either panning or softening the music.