During lockdown, I was lucky enough to be able to spend a lot of time with my infant daughter as she learned to crawl, walk, and talk. Inspired by her explorations of the house, I recorded her toys and wrote this short piece: a reminder that there can still be joy and wonder, even when the world seems so small.
Yesterday saw the premiere of my short piece Small Things at BEAST FEaST 2021, alongside music from many other talented composers. Small Things uses children’s toys as source material, in particular a wooden xylophone and sleigh bells, and also features a lot of granular processing. I also experimented with creative use of convolution reverb, using samples of the toys as impulses in Cubase’s REVerence plugin – I got some really exciting effects out of this, at the cost of nearly maxing out my computer’s processor and sending the cooling fan into overdrive.
Towards the end of composing, however, I still felt the piece was missing something. Eventually (and after sending in the programme note above!) I hit on the idea of using the actual sounds of my daughter playing to finish the piece. By this point she was in bed for the night and the piece needed to be sent in the next day! To get around this, I trawled my phone for videos and recorded the audio output – improvised play on the xylophone, a piano, and a guitar. As these weren’t particularly high-quality recordings, they also added a nice subtle layer of noise to the piece, which I felt brought the whole thing together and implied a sense of nostalgia which seemed to fit the themes of play and exploration. I’m a big fan of using these kinds of “dirty” recordings as elements in a piece – the addition of noise, hiss, mic handling, etc. can draw attention to the nature of the recording medium, and gives the opportunity to compose with the perceptions of sounds, rather than just the sounds themselves.
You can rewatch the livestream of the concert Small Things was featured in here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssBfkVAEcxU or check out the rest of the festival here: http://www.beast.bham.ac.uk/beast-feast-2021/
Small Things will be available to download or stream soon!
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