Last week each laptop orchestra played their piece to the rest of the group which was very successful. Yesterday each group had to play their piece once again to the rest of the group to show any areas which they may of changed to improve on their performance since last week. Each group changed something within their piece to what they had previously played the week before. Again it was very interesting to see these changes in comparison to last weeks lecture since all the groups have greatly improved.
Group 1
Group 1 carried on with their improvisation piece which works extremely well as I think they are the only group to create the whole piece feeding off each others ideas and improvising on the spot. I think this brings an uncertainty element to the music which is different from all the other groups, and its definitely something which I would like to include into my groups piece as we have a set structure.
Group 3
Group 3 improved a lot since last week as they just slightly altered different aspects of their structure and different sounds which brought a whole new edge to the piece. They used a certain technique of having sounds fade in and out dramatically which built up tension in the piece and overall made it interesting to listen to.
Group 4
Group 4 changed a lot to their previous piece the week before. This week they unfortunately had a couple of members missing from their orchestra so two of them had to play the whole piece. Considering this they did a great job by improvising with different instruments. They also stopped using the drum loop which was the only thing which let them down this week and through that they had a much more interesting piece.
Group 5
Group 5 used the same principle for their piece as last week, but they did make some significant changes. Last week they started their piece with a fast drum loop which slowed down and everyone was then incorporated into the piece. This week they used a similar process by keeping the drum loop going throughout the whole piece which the speed was then played around with. This gave some nice dimensions to the music and it also built up tension similar to group 3′s but in a different way.
Group 2 (my group)
During the last week since our previous performance in front of the other groups we had a couple of practises in which we discussed possible ideas which we could include for this weeks performance. We thought we could create new sounds and add in new sections to make the piece a bit more diverse. But when we practised this it seemed to get a little messy and certain areas of the piece weren’t as clean as we played the week before. We decided to stick with the structure from last week as it worked fairly well with everyone playing their piece and then certain members of the orchestra fading out.
I have been using the poly machine most with in the laptop orchestra as I like the way I can create a basic rhythm and then gradually add in other notes to build up the piece.
Here are some of the notes which I lay down to start of the piece on the polymachine running through the sample of a talking clock.
As you can see I can gradually add in more and more boxes as the piece moves forward. I tend not to fill too many in as I like gaps in between the different bleeps.
During the practises since last weeks performance I experimented with the predator instrument as this gave some nice random sounds which I thought I could use at the start of the piece to then gradually lead in the poly machine. After this I would cut out the Predator and improvise using the sound scratcher. During practises I have been using distortion and slight reverb on the poly machine as it gave a rough edge to the piece but due to previous practises when all my sound cut out I decided not to chance it during the performance.
Here is the predator instrument which I have been using. I’m not much of a fan of it but I like the random different sounds it brings to the start of my groups piece.
Overall I think our performance this week was steady but not as good as last week. This could be down to the fact that Jason wasn’t in this week so we lost some ambience and our starting cue, but I think we could still improve by breaking down the structure and listening to each other more.
