Last Spring, I fulfilled a part of my curriculum as a directing major where the four of us studied in New York through Syracuse University, primarily interning on productions through the city. I didn’t know anyone, and I was working non-stop. So, it was pretty isolating!
While theatre is a social art form, music doesn’t have to be, and so over that semester (as well as before), I was creating music any chance I got. One of those products, a rendition of “Rainy Days and Mondays” by the Carpenters in the style of Animal Crossing’s KK Slider, has become the subject for my experiment. With it, I wanted to explore the visceral experience of a song who’s tempo and arrangement borders on melancholy as it morphs into ambient desolation, and then returns seemingly unaware of its own metamorphosis
One of my favorite audio manipulating tools in the world is Audacity’s “Change Speed”, in which both tempo and pitch are affected by a multiplier ranging from 0.010 to 5. The ramifications of that range are immense: ten seconds of audio multiplied by .1 can become a minute and forty seconds of continuous sound, while also illuminating overtones and frequencies that the human ear would have taken for granted from the sample.
With this piece, I worked backwards, taking ten seconds from the end of the track and decrementing the speed by .1. I continued to do this for every ten seconds preceding it. Once reaching 0.1 itself, I reversed the process and incremented by .1 up to 1.2, returning back down so that the track begins at the initial pitch it was created in and would end up at. The result is a piece nearing 9 minutes in length, which devolves into a disorienting ambient wasteland during an acoustic guitar solo in the mid-section. There’s a decent number of glitching-out sounds during the switches in tempo: this is due to the fact that the 10-second chunks were all mapped out by hand, and so in human error, there are overlaps of the speed being devolved. I rather like it, though, as I feel like it only intensifies the personal connection.
