Only have 5 minutes? Scroll down to the presentation video for a quick summary.

For the explorations project, we were tasked with coming up with a project ourselves, and explore our own passions using techniques from freestyle. For me, I’ve been playing classical music for most of my life, so doing something music related was key- Though I did want to focus on production, since that is a facet of music that was unfamiliar to me. To keep it relevant to my class, I also used Adobe Illustrator to make graphics to go along with the music, which sounds dreadfully familiar to the Experimental Music project- I’d like to note that both projects had different angles going into them… though it doesn’t change the fact that they are almost the same.

Here is one of the Illustrator works, meant to go with a track based on creating space, and a large soundscape. To make the antlers, I used a lot of reference images and created it in layers to I could create more depth and have it wrap around a centerpiece- which is a bit hard to see with the colors in hindsight.
And here is one of the reason shots, I wanted to take this picture to show my current favorite set up- having the Rack separate from the Sequencer and Mixer. This way, the rack can be used separately, but when I’m sequencing, I can make quick adjustments to sound- especially since I only use few instruments for the sake of being less confused, there was screen real estate not being used, so the Mixer makes the workflow just a tad quicker.

And to give an example of how everything came together, take a look at these two visual productions:

Hopefully, the two pieces speak differently, since that was the aim of the project: To practice conveying different ideas through different mechanics.

Explorations Infographic

For the infographic, I did pretty much everything in Adobe Illustrator. In researching, on top of doing secondary research, I also did a discussion with some of my piano-playing friends to try and work with our background knowledges and bring a newer angle on these sorts of mechanics… And below, though simplified drastically, are some of the macro points that we came up with.

And to tie the whole unit together, we also did a presentation- which is sort of a summary of everything you have just read up to this point.

Experimental Music

This music project was similar to my explorations project, but I decided to approach it in a different way- rather than obsessing over the details and methods of which I was doing everything, I took a looser approach, and just messed about on my keyboard in Reason to see what I could come up with.

As you can see, I worked with a few different samples, and ended up making the final work pretty simple, with only a piano. It’s not the best work that I could have done, but it was certainly living up to it’s prompt, being experimental (at least for me.)
And this is what I came up with- I wanted the album art to be similarly as sparse. I also liked the idea of trying to show cleanliness/perfection, like that in circle-based logo design, so I went with that sort of style going into it.