Week 8 - Nine Inch Nails and Honours

Audio arts (1) was an introduction into microphone choice and placement. Having done several ‘extracurricular’ recordings this year already, I have had a fair amount of experience with the microphones available. It seems to be the general consensus that the most expensive are always the best (“Just grab the Nygen”), but for me it has been experimenting with a variety to choose what is best for each specific sound source. If I’m recording a vocalist in the deadroom, I often set up 2 different microphones for the first take, and then (possibly) use the one that had an less desirable recording as a room mic. I like to think that I’m covering my bases, as if I only had one microphone and nothing to compare it to, I might be missing out on something better.

Continuing the treacherous swim through the ProTools mutagenic lake, Creative Computing (2) had us remixing the Nine Inch Nails song ‘Only’. After 4 hours of sampling loops and ambience from other NIN songs*, I used Luke’s hard drive to transfer the collection of files to an Audio Lab computer. Upon opening the ‘Only’ ProTools session from the drop box, I began deleting all the repeated files until I was left with just the ‘skin and bones’ of the song. I then imported all of my samples, giving each different song’s collection of samples its own track. Let the games begin! Roughly 6 hours of ‘time compression/expansion’ later, and I had this to show. Some of the timing is out, but it got to 11:30 on Sunday night and I had to run in the rain to catch my bus. Good times! I am aware I didn’t need to go to the extent of sampling, but once I got stuck into it I didn’t see any reason to stop. I conveniently waited until 20 minutes before my bus before realising that I had no way to save the session - I don’t have a portable hard drive. I managed to save all the files to a CD, but so far the session will not open up again.

David Harris went out on a limb for this week’s listening session (3), and played a diversity of electronic music. Looks like my prayers were answered, as we were able to compare abstract works such as music concrete "Voile d'Orphée" (1953) from Pierre Henry to modern(ish) songs like “Breathe” from Pink Floyd. I found some interesting “Breathe” folklore. We also heard a very early Pink Floyd song called “Bike”, which was shockingly bad. Here’s the lyrics if you want a good laugh. Much to my appreciation, Led Zeppelin’s excellent “Whole Lotta Love” was played, and there was also a Frank Zappa piece "Mr. Green Genes" which did little to inspire. Although this certainly inspired thought.

The student projects that were presented to us in the second half of the workshop put some perspective on what it takes to do honours in Music Technology. Tim Swalling explained his project on "A-Life: Artificial Life in the Creation of Music", (4) which is essentially explaining the natural and computational processes in music creation. Jasmin Ward’s (5) project centred around using music to heal the world or something - much like Michael Jackson. I trailed off after the 3rd seven-syllable word. I guess I need to read more books or something. Now I see why I didn’t get into that nuclear physics course I tried so hard for. It turns out Jasmin is also a 15 year old boxer and a gynaecologist.

* If you care, I sampled from: “The Wretch”; “The Day The World Went Away (Quiet )”; “We’re In This Together Now”; “Starfuckers Inc.”; “Ripe (With Decay)”; “Please (Never Leave)”; “The Marks Have Been Made”; “I'm Looking Forward To Joining You, Finally”; “The Frail”; “Where Is Everybody”; “Even Deeper”; “Complications Of The Flesh”.


1. Christian Haines. “Audio Arts: Microphones.” Practical class presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 02/05/2006.

2. Christian Haines. “Creative Computing: ProTools.” Practical class presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 04/05/2006

3. David Harris. “Music Technology Workshop: Listening Workshop.” Workshop presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 04/05/2006.

4. Tim Swalling. “Music Technology Presentation: Student Project.” Presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 04/05/2006.

5. Jasmin Ward. “Music Technology Presentation: Student Project.” Presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 04/05/2006.


Picture References
Microphone http://fr.wikipedia.org/
Led Zeppelin http://www.musicstack.com/
Pink Floyd http://www.lacosaweb.com/
Nine Inch Nails http://www.nineinchnails.net/