A Few Personal Projects

I recently uploaded two of my personal projects to Youtube, in preparation to use them as resume material. Both were done for my Sound, Image, and Story class, which focuses primarily on the use of sound and music to support, enhance, or alter a plot-driven visual work.

The first project is a photo roman , a movie that consists entirely of still images. The images follow a passage of narration which I was inspired to write by the photos. I mixed in a bed of sound design, including a few iterations of a particularly fun effect in which I isolate one or more resonances in a field recording:



Stepping away from twisted, existential prose, my second project is a mashup edit of the famous courtroom scene from the film A Few Good Men , starring Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson. I changed their relationship a bit...



Not only was this sonically a very friendly scene to re-cut, but when Jack Nicholson feeds you lines like "Deep down in places you don't talk about at parties..." it's just too hard to refuse.

"The Township" ...

...taking your computer screen by storm with 60,000 hits on youtube so far! The music was composed, performed and recorded by Kevin Dekimpe and mixed by myself. Take a gander!

The Recent Ailments of "The Beatbox"

I must digress for a moment from my usual "This is what I recorded today!" posts. It has been nearly 4 months since my faithful, aging Subaru Legacy made the 550-mile trip from Bethesda, MD to Ann Arbor and it has been squeaky-clean since then, albeit only in analogy, not in appearance. Recently, though, it began losing its grip on the fan belt, producing the infamous *eeky eeky eeky eeky eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee* sound. I took him to the shop, all is well (while I was there, check out what I saw)

I think a lot of college students with old-but-reliable cars develop a bit of a loving pet-human relationship with their loyal vehicle, myself included. So when I began to hear this cry for help my mind instantly filled in images of sudden auto-death instead of the $50 that it actually took to fix this relatively routine problem.

But hey Beatbox is fine, and before I took him in I even got a sweet sound recording of his squeals:



You didn't think I would let this sound get away, did you? (Warning: this is a bit loud)

Car Start w/ Loose Fanbelt by mattglenn

Flutes, Drums, and Composing...Oh My

Back in Diver land I have been doing much research on the culture behind the Shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese bamboo flute who's use dates back to 13th century zen monks, or komuso, who used the flute during prayers and meditation and to seek alms on the street. Music for this flute was organized into honkyoku, individual pieces that varied in tone, tempo and length. Here is an example, entitled Akita sugagaki:



In the 18th century, a komuso named Kinko Kurosawa was commissioned by the shogunate to travel throughout the lands of Japan to document the enormous variety of honkyoku that existed by that time. Incredibly, many of these honkyoku are taught and performed without the aid of scripted music. I have been in contact with Shakuhachi master Michael Chikuzen Gould (not to be confused with UM percussion professor Michael Gould, although the two have collaborated). We are hoping to work out a mechanical license agreement so that I can use his gorgeous recordings in the sound design for The Diver.

The Diver, by the way, is heavily influenced by traditional Japanese Noh theatre which, while an incredibly beautiful art, can appear very jarring to western audiences due to its slow pace and the unique vocal style employed:



I am hoping to adopt the instrumentation of Noh for some of my designs, including a shoulder-played drum called a Kotsuzumi, a hip-drum called a Otsuzumi, and the unmistakeable high-pitched Nohkan flute.


It will be fun and very hard to bring a new twist to the usual use of these instruments; on the other hand, it seems that most Japanese musicians and actors have trained for their entire lives to become masters, so I probably won't have a choice :).

Some Pillowtalk

The much-anticipated return of the University of Michigan student body has swept over Ann Arbor. Traffic lights become more decoration than law as the pedestrians become the dominant source of traffic control, while most cars contain new or returning students rushing around to buy tall-twin bedsheets and colorful, economical storage units. Amidst the I find myself reminded of the inherent distraction that college social life can cause. It's not entirely unhealthy for the typical student, to whom a week or so of meeting, greeting, and eating can be a therapeutic break from the tiresome norm. Alas, I am not, by those standards, a typical student.

For starters, I love my work. Not like, love. Like one would love a soul mate. I frequently ask myself how sound design can possibly be a career when it feels so little like a job. Sound design is my primary area of study, though, and this semester I am preparing designs for a theatre performance which will be my senior thesis project. I have been working for quite a while already on this project and lately I have noticed that I am very easily distracted by all that is going on around me. Between packing up my room, preparing to move, eating, working on (or even thinking about) other projects and seeing old friends, I have very little time to sit down and tackle the designs that I ought to be churning out by now.

I wish I could say that there exists a reliable process to creating a soundscape or sound effect sequence, but no such scientific method exists. Like most arts, the creative process for sound design is often based so much on spontaneous inspiration and/or resources at hand, so if my mind is focusing on plans for the evening, edits for my long-overdue movie mix, the excruciating 5 days it has been since I have taken a run, or emails from my parents about grad schools then I have very little capacity remaining to think creatively. Unfortunately, such seemingly trivial things in my life take a serious toll on my workflow.

And the biggest culprit of all? Sleep habits. Yes, the body pillow and I seem to have shorter and shorter cuddle sessions. I definitely shouldn't be writing this at 4am, but that's my cycle. It does not help my brain function and I know it, I feel it daily. Unfortunately, I often do not have the spine to deny my friends' and girlfriend's invitations to extend the bedtime. I know they couldn't possibly understand how strongly I feel about sleep, but sometimes I just do not have the will power to "get all serious" and explain it to them. There we go, it's a goal.

Lesson: don't ignore sleep. It's the best medicine and the most reliable brainstorm-recharger.

I leave you with one of the cues that I have worked hard on for the diver. If you can, try to listen on headphones or on a good speaker system.

Dive Sample 2 by mattglenn

So I am back from California...

...but that does not mean I have put away my recording gear at all. I have been capturing various sound from the area and have begun my designs for The Diver , the play I am sound designing as my senior thesis project.

Today, I was grabbing breakfast with my friends Rebecca and James and James made this "interesting" grunt-like sound by making his voice break. So I recorded it and decided to play around. The result is a fairly creepy low-pitched moan. I demonstrate the process from original grunt to Lord-of-the-Rings-forest groan in this clip:

Pitch Shifting My Friend James by mattglenn

I made this while playing with Bias Peak LE software, and I discovered that the pitch-shifting algorithm in Peak is miles above any of the software I own. Sorry mom, sorry dad, might be spending some more money...

California, Day 1

I am here in Davis, California hanging out with the family and getting ready to drive down to Lake Tahoe for a few days for some hiking, swimming, rock climbing, and other what-not. My brother, Jon (who runs his own blog HERE), knows of an area where burrowing owls have nests, so last night I went out with the field sound kit to try to get some owl calls recorded.

Well hey definitely live up to their reputation as silent flyers. Even when I approached a small group of them huddled together by a burrow they merely stared silently, a few ducking into the large circular entrances to their dens. Once I got close enough, though, one owl broke off from the group and flew a few yards to my other side, calling and flapping his wings wildly. I can only guess that this was a threat, distraction or some signal to the other owls in response to my presence, but the others silently started to scatter or retreat into the burrows. Most were gone in a matter of minutes, but for the 10 minutes of recording that I did I managed to pull together a few amazing examples of the single owl's calls:

Burrowing Owls by mattglenn

Jon has been photographing the owls for a while, you can see some of his pictures here (to see the full-size versions of the photos, hold your mouse over the yellow icon in the bottom left corner and click the link):



I will have the kit down in Tahoe and I hope to add to my wildlife sounds collection. Will post more soon!