Experimental Composition

This composition deals with the ideas of organized music, or something with a rhythm, and chaos, and what you get when you combine the two. Personally I find listening to disorganized or chaotic sound very displeasing, so I wanted to somewhat expand on that compared to something steady, and therefore pleasing to listen to (to me). My score is very open ended. The pink line ontop represents a chaotic sound. The blue like represents a non rhythmic, but not necessarily chaotic sound. The yellow line is a sound with a rhythm that doesn't have to correspond with the other rhythms. The blue line with the green verticals represents two different constant rhythms that work in conjunction with each other. The fact that all the colors and lines are in one clump means to play these sounds all 
at once. The fact that this is so open ended means it's going to be completely different for every person. An "organized" or "disorganized" sound is different for every person, and depending on whose creating the song, it could be very coherent. I like the idea of giving people an outline and letting them do as they please in terms of creating a song.

If anything is music...

If anything can be music, what type of music is worth making?

If anything can be music, I think the type of music worth making is music that makes people listen to sounds in a different way. I think experimental music does this in part. For example, Cage’s 4:33 makes people suddenly aware of all the sounds that exist in a time frame that should be “silent”. Suddenly people are hearing themselves breathe and think, or hearing people’s feet shuffling, and thinking about these sounds in a new way. I also think music worth making should evoke emotion or some kind of reaction from listeners.

What makes a combination of sound worth listening to?

In my opinion, humans as a race strive to understand things and experience things in some kind of order. For this reason I think the kind of music worth listening to is organized sound, something that makes sense without being too predictable. To me, something worth listening to is not random, for everyday life is random, and I’m always hearing sounds at random. In terms of music, I want the sounds to be organized, to have some type of rhythm or repeating pattern. If the sounds are organized and pleasant, I will pay more attention to them. This is just what’s pleasing to me, though. This is not to say that random or disorganized sound is not worth listening to for some. I think there’s a lot of merits to making people listen to random sound for 4 minutes and 33 seconds in the mental confines of considering the happenings in those 4 minutes and 33 seconds music.

Commercial Project

For this project I first took one of McCain's negative campaign ads towards Obama and changed the words so that it favored Obama instead of McCain. I then switched the images to match the audio. Next I added a beat to sort of obscure the meaning, turning the focus more towards a rhythm and a sort of song than politics. I also changed the pitch on the spoken words to make them stand out against the beat.

Here is the Original: