Plume

One of the most challenging aspects of making music with spectral deconstruction methods is the development of coherent musical form. In a previous work called After October, I solved this problem by choosing source material with a relatively long duration and manually slowing the pacing of musical events. The use of a single source facilitated musical cohesion.

With Plume, I wanted to develop musical form using sonically-related sources with a short duration that required the use of repeated material. To do this, I used relatively few output layers in the initial presentation of ideas and saved unused layers for the later repetition of material.

I achieved additional variation through orchestration and spatialization. Because the chainsaws start and stop at distinct points in the source recordings, the entrances of musical layers appear close together. Orchestrating with sounds that feature sharp transients and fast decay times provided ample opportunity to vary the resonance and reverberation techniques applied to repeated gestures.