Original Electro-acoustic Composition

Introduction

Hello everyone! My name is Shelby Tweedie and for my final project in MU 2300 Foundations of Music Technology, I have created an original electro-acoustic composition that includes both a MIDI instrumental component and an audio recording of my own voice. My goal was to compose a complete song that sounded as though it were recorded in a studio, similar to the popular music that is heard on the radio. The deliverable of my final project is an audio WAV file of my original song that is about 5 and a half minutes in length, slightly longer than the typical length of popular music on the radio today. My song was inspired by the likes of Lee Brice’s “I Drive Your Truck,” Luke Bryan’s “Drink A Beer,” Thomas Rhett’s “Heaven Right Now,” and Hardy’s “Giving Heaven Some Hell.” This song has particular significance to me as I have written it about a late family member who was a very special part of my family and I’s lives. I composed this piece with my family as the audience in mind, as they would be most impacted by the lyrics due to their personal connection to the story that I am telling. However, I hope that this song could be enjoyed and appreciated by anybody who has lost a loved one and can make a connection to the general message of the song, even without the personal relationship to my specific story. I am hoping that this piece will be heart-touching and sentimental, and will bring old familial memories to the surface in a light that honors those who have passed.

Please enjoy my original song, titled "Stanley Hare", embedded below under "Ways To Watch". Thank you for listening!

Overview

Methods

To begin the composition process, I created the instrumental accompaniment in Ableton Live with individual tracks for parts including the grand piano, strings, and percussion. Once I assembled these tracks to create the instrumental portion, I listened to the piece with headphones and recorded myself using a separate microphone as I sang along with the lyrics that I had written, in order to ensure that my vocals aligned with the instrumentals. I then inserted this audio track that I had recorded into Ableton Live and made the necessary adjustments to the track to properly align the audio recording with the respective instrumental tracks.

My composition consists of 7 MIDI tracks: three with the grand piano sound applied (for convenience and ease of reading and making adjustments for myself as I worked), one with the strings quartet sound, one with the strings ensemble sound, one with the strings cruiser st sound, and one with the drums acuff kit applied. I took advantage of the session view in Ableton Live to compose my piece to visually see my work move on a timeline as it was played back to align the different tracks. I began with the initial grand piano melody in the first track and built the following tracks upon this foundation. I hand-selected the different instrument sounds that I added to each track to find the sounds that best matched the instruments that I was trying to emulate. I manually entered each of the notes in this composition without the use of a MIDI keyboard or controller, and made all of the alterations to the durations, positions, and pitches of the notes in each track by hand, utilizing the copy and paste feature for consistency in the verses, choruses, and bridges throughout the piece.

In terms of recording the vocal performance, I used a simple microphone, which increased the excess noise in the recording and the slight misrepresentation of my voice. I took three separate recordings of my voice singing the complete song while listening to the MIDI instrumentals through headphones in order to select the recording that I felt sounded the best. With the WAV file of my recording, I utilized Audacity to cut, copy, and paste sections of the audio recording as was necessary to remove flaws in the recording, such as my breathing during periods of silence, background noise, and the sound of my computer running, and stitched these sections together in order to correct for the parts of my performance that I was unhappy with. I also used the loudness normalization, noise reduction, compression, and high pass filter effects in Audacity prior to saving this updated file and inserting it into Ableton Live. Once inserted into Live, I utilized the compressor, reverb, and EQ eight.

With the vocal recording inserted and aligned with the MIDI tracks, I was then able to make adjustments to the feel of the experience that I was trying to create with the music, and make any slight changes to the shape of the MIDI instrumental sounds using reverb, cabinet, and EQ effects to account for the “fakeness” of the artificial sounds. The final step in the process of meshing the electronic and vocal aspects of the piece was adjusting such parameters as the gain level, attack, decay time, sustain, density, etc. of the sounds in each MIDI track to formulate one uniform composition.

Ways to Listen

Audio Only (higher sound quality):

Audio and Video of Ableton Live Session View (lower sound quality screen recording):