Tag: commission

Facebook Advertising

Some readers may remember my advertising spree last winter, in support of my short commissions. I’m carrying on with the noise project again. I have a goal of putting out an album when I reach 45 noise shorts and I am currently on #36, so there’s just 9 to go! Check out my shop to order one.

For me, doing the promotion is part of doing the project. With my Christmas album, I tended to do facebook posts for every song I put out, so it seemed natural to kick off the latest (and possibly final) round of noise music commissions via a post to my facebook page.

Looking for a really unique valentines gift? Why not bespoke noise music? https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/celesteh

Posted by Charles Céleste Hutchins on Wednesday, 6 January 2016

Due to the temporary benevolence of facebook algorithms, a fair number of people actually saw the post. Then these same algorithms alerted me that this post was doing very well. Was I interested in promoting it, say to US-based fans of Christian rock?

I LOLed. Although, it was an idea that suck with me. When I lived in Berkeley, the guitarist/song writer for Sixpence None the Richer was my next door neighbour for a year. He turned out to be a very nice chap. We went for coffee many times and when we talked music tech, we had a very large number of interests and issues in common. While I tend to have more secular views, there’s certainly nothing in my music that has religious baggage either way. Are we not to ‘make a joyful noise unto the Lord’?

Alas, I don’t think facebook advertising is ethical, because of its data collection and tracking, etc, but it’s also very cheap. Bless me, for I have sinned. I gave £7 to Facebook, in exchange for 7 days of showing my posts to Americans who probably knew what the Dove Awards were before living next door to a many-time winner.

Ardour Screen ShotAfter suggesting that I turn the post into an advert and taking my money, Facebook promptly declared that my advert was against their guidelines. The image, a screen shot of the Ardour program that I use for music-making, contains too much text. I made an appeal and they relented.

I’m still on the first day of this experiment. So far:

  • 2 Christian rock fans have clicked ‘like’ on the post (a cost of 50p each)
  • 6 people have clicked through to view the shop.
  • 0 people have clicked through to either sale item.
  • 0 people have made any orders.

I’m paying £1 / day for this little experiment, so the week-long advert will cost as much as 1 sale. I have a feeling this is not money well spent, but I can see why advertisers do pay facebook. If I had been less ridiculous and, say, paid to attract the attention of Canadian fans of noise music, it’s possible to speculate that the novelty of seeing ‘bespoke noise’ advertised to fans of the genre might actually gain me listeners if not orders.

Music commissions make great gifts. Order now for this Valentines Day!

What is Noise Music Anyway?

The question I am most frequently asked about my commissions is, ‘What is noise music?’ An excellent question!
Noise music is incredibly diverse, from the lush drones of Éliane Radigue, to the aggressive edge of Elizabeth Veldon, to the quiet whispers of Maggi Payne, to the subversive raucous of Cosey Fanni Tutti to the glitchy digitalism of Shelly Knotts. There is also, of course, a specific context and history of the genre, starting with Russolo’s Futurist manifesto, The Art of Noise, up through early industrial and bands like Throbbing Gristle and then Japanese noise from people like Merzbow. But even though this is important, let’s talk about what sonically unifies these many different sounds of noise music, rather than the cultural bit.

Different kinds of music have different elements that are their primary focus. For example, Bach chorales are largely about harmony. Christmas carols are about melody. And a lot of current pop music is primarily about rhythm. Noise music is about timbre. That means the quality, or texture, of the sound. There can, of course, be all of these other elements in noise music, but a noise composer is very often trying to create a collage of sounds that are interesting based on texture.

Unlike other musical elements, there isn’t really a specialist vocabulary for timbre. Sounds might be described as ‘rough’ or ‘smooth’ or ‘glitchy’. Practitioners talk about this roughly the same way as listeners do. While noise music isn’t exactly new – the Art of Noises was published in 1913 – it’s still very much an area being explored, not fully codified in the way that other musics might be.

In fact, you can make noise music yourself! Although noise has not historically been given much consideration, any new parent can tell you that babies love noise. Humans are attracted to this kind of music from their youngest moments. We all are born with an attraction to these kinds of sounds. So you can experiment yourself at noise making and try recording some sounds that you think are nice. Your might use the microphone on your phone, your camera or your laptop (or a regular mic if you have one). Try dragging your mic along different surfaces, to record the sound of the physical texture. How does your sofa sound vs a wall? How do different kinds of bricks sound? Or try putting your mic next to something that makes interesting quiet sounds.
Pause for a moment and listen to the place you are at. What do you hear? Maybe your laptop fan? A refrigerator? A kettle? A copy machine? Passing cars? If you put the mic very close to the source of these sounds, sometimes the recordings can reveal hidden depth. Maybe your office copy machine has a quiet rhythmic clicking as it copies.
Now that you have all these recordings, you can try to arrange them. Audacity is a free program that might be useful for this. Or maybe you want to listen to them as they are. Play your collages or recordings for a friend. Now you’re a noise composer!
If you have a bunch of recordings you like and want to commission me, I can use them as source material. Commissioned music makes a great gift for babies or for Valentines Day! Order yours today!

Noisy Week

I’ve posted TWO noise music commissions this week and sent a third to the patron who commissioned me. I’ll post it as soon as she gives me a title.
The first one was in honour of the birthday / retirement of Paul Berg from Sonology. One of his former students organised a large number of short commissions, which were compiled together in something they called ‘The AC Jukebox’, titled for the software that Paul developed. I talked a lot about the piece on my podcast, where you can read the notes of how it was assembled and some reminiscences on having Paul as a teacher.
The next piece I posted was commissioned by Lauren Redhead in honour of her friend, Caroline, who had a birthday. The party was last night and I have not yet heard how it went down as a gift, so here’s hoping it was well-received!
This was a digital piece and since it was my first digital piece in this series, I went a bit overboard with the processing. I wrote a SuperCollider script to generate 10 short source sounds and then used other scripts to manipulate the files as if there were images. I set up a lot of batch processing to go through them. I like this processing method a lot, and so will have more to say about my scripts shortly. I’m calling the suite of tools autoglitch!
Lauren told me that Caroline likes harsh noise, so this piece is a lot of glitching with no reverb. It’s dry digitalism! I did have to run it through a short SuperCollider script to remove DC bias, which was very helpful to make it speaker safe without changing the perceptual sound. You can give it a listen on my podcast.

Making that piece created a load of weird, glitchy images, which are also nice. The ideas that lead to this piece and this way of working are very much from talking to Antonio Roberts, who had lots of helpful suggestions and who posted his own tutorials on glitch art. His stuff is great.
As for the piece awaiting a title, I don’t want to say too much about it yet, but I will say that the commissioner had a bit of a poppy sensibility, so I used some compression and faux plate reverb.
If you’ve got a friend with an upcoming birthday or want to give something really original for the holidays, consider giving the gift of noise! If you order now, delivery is guaranteed in time for Hanukkah or Christmas!

Do you love noise music? Do you have fashion? Drop me an email if you’d like your image to be in forthcoming posts about noise and fashion

What is a commission?

When you commission me to write a piece, of music, you essentially pay me to write one minute of noise music. After I write it, you get to come up with the title. You are then a patron of the arts, causing new art works to come into being!
Afterwards, you get a copy of the music, which you are free to share with friends (under the terms of a Share Music License). I retain copyright of the work.
This makes a great gift – you can title the work to honour the recipient, or have a dedication attached. Your friend gets a copy of the piece of music and has their name tied to the music. So If you title the piece, say, ‘Happy Birthday to Susan Jones’, that would be attached to the music as the title, whenever anybody listened to it. (If Susan Jones feels overwhelmed by this, it can be re-titled.)
And I will do my best to try to make sure that people do listen, by posting it to my website and eventually compiling all the commissions into an album and publishing it.
Let’s say you decide to do this, how would it work?

The Process

  1. If your delivery date is less than two weeks away, please contact me before ordering. Depending on my schedule, etc, I will probably be able to accommodate you, but it’s a good idea to make sure!
  2. You would then order the commission and I would get to work making it. Do you want a physical CD posted to you or not? When you order, check that you’ve picked the right item in the shop. One comes with a CD. The other doesn’t.
  3. Within a few days, I will send you via email a link to a high quality audio file.
  4. After you listen to the file and decide on a tile, you would send me back the title and dedication.
  5. If you ordered a physical CD, I would then post it to you via first or second class post.
  6. If you would like an MP3 with the correct metadata (including title, etc), I can send that to you via email.
  7. I normally would then post the MP3 online to my website. However, if this is a gift, I’m happy to hold off until after you give the person a file or disk. Or post it right away so you can link them to the site. Whichever works best for you!

Who might this make a good gift for?

Do people really like this?

All my customers have been happy so far!

Will it arrive in time for Christmas or Hanukkah?

Yes, if you order soon!

Music commissions make great gifts. Order now for this holiday season!

How do commissions work?

Let’s say your friend has a birthday next week. Would I be able to do something? How does the commissioning process work?

  1. If your delivery date is less than two weeks away, please contact me before ordering. Depending on my schedule, etc, I will probably be able to accommodate you, but it’s a good idea to make sure!
  2. You would then order the commission and I would get to work making it. Do you want a physical CD posted to you or not? When you order, check that you’ve picked the right item in the shop. One comes with a CD. The other doesn’t.
  3. Within a few days, I will send you via email a link to a high quality audio file.
  4. After you listen to the file and decide on a tile, you would send me back the title and dedication.
  5. If you ordered a physical CD, I would then post it to you via first or second class post.
  6. If you would like an MP3 with the correct metadata (including title, etc), I can send that to you via email.
  7. I normally would then post the audio online to my website. However, if this is a gift, I’m happy to hold off until after you give the person a file or disk. Or post it right away so you can link them to the site. Whichever works best for you!

Commissions make excellent birthday gifts. In fact, this is the most popular use of commissions! However, they can also be used to mark other dates or events, like the holidays! Although I can usually do last minute commissions for birthdays, with larger holidays, its safer to plan in advance! If you order in November, delivery is guaranteed in time for Hanukkah or Christmas!

Do you love noise music? Do you have fashion? Drop me an email if you’d like your image to be in forthcoming posts about noise and fashion

Acoustic Noise

I’ve just posted a new piece of noise to my podcast, which was commissioned and titled by David Jensenius.

Shorts #31: 1416343620

The title he gave me is the unix timecode (aka: the time expressed as milliseconds since Midnight 1 January 1970 GMT) that he received the commission.
I’ve always had a particularly hard time coming up with titles. Sometimes, it took me as long to title a piece as it took to write the piece in the first place! When I first started this commissioning project, I was somewhat thinking of Mark Twain.
In one of the Tom Sawyer stories, Tom has been told to paint a fence. Since he doesn’t enjoy the task, he starts thinking of ways to get somebody else to do it for him. He could pay them, but he doesn’t have much money. He decided to use psychology instead. He would convince other boys that painting was really fun and they would ask to do it. Then, he realises, if it’s such a joy, they might pay him for the chance to paint. All those pick-your-own strawberry fields are based on the same principle.
I hate picking titles, so therefore, other people should pay me to do it for me! Of course, there’s more to a commission than that! There’s the knowledge that you’ve caused a new work to exist, and a piece of music made just for you!
David wanted an acoustic piece, so I recorded a bunch of sounds around my house. The house is still being painted and the dog was still quarantined, so this combination limited my access to hard drives full of archived recordings (waiting for music to be put into) and made it hard to go out into the world and get new recordings. Fortunately, there’s a lot of fascinating little sounds in the home. I’ve been intending to record my tea kettle for some time, and this finally got me to do it, with my zoom recorder. (Surprisingly, the wider angle microphones got a much nicer recording than the close ones, so keep that in mind, should you decide to record your own kettle.)
I got one extra sound that just did not fit into David’s piece. I recorded myself growling into a microphone, which made a nice harsh noise sound, but the rest of this piece was not harsh. Fortunately, I found a good application for that sound: the Swift Noise Compilation.
A few weeks ago, Taylor Swift released 8 seconds of white noise to iTunes, which topped the charts in Canada. In dedication to her chart topping short noise single, a tribute album is being put together of 8 second long noise pieces. This is extremely short, even for me!
The brief said white noise, but I strayed from that. My growl was only about 4 seconds long, so I ran it through PaulStretch and then used sox to cut it to exactly the right length:

sox –norm stretch.wav trimmed.aiff fade 0 00:00:07.98 0.07 pad 0.02@7.98
This trimmed the sound to 7.98 seconds, with a 0.07 second fade out at the end and 0.02 seconds of silence after that. Then, I used Audacity to put a stereo plate reverb filter on it. I love plate reverb and if I lived some place quiet, I’d try to get a real one.

My next acoustic commission will have a wider world to draw from, as my puppy is now finally clear to walk anywhere I’d care to take him. Today he will have his first trip to a dog park!
I’ve got another commission in my queue and then after that, I’m free to work on yours! Commissions make great gifts. If you order in November, delivery is guaranteed in time for Hanukkah or Christmas!

Do you love noise music? Do you have fashion? Drop me an email if you’d like your image to be in forthcoming posts about noise and fashion

New Noise

I’ve just posted a new piece of noise to my podcast, which was commissioned and titled by Dan Stowell.

Shorts #30: A lazy afternoon in the shade

The title he gave me is a reference to the Philae comet landing. Dan asked for analogue noise, adding he wanted ‘undulations’, if possible. I made some sound that seemed fairly undulating to me, which I recorded in five tracks, all somewhat different from each other. They used my new Gravity Well module from Circuit Abbey, which does orbital modelling. Since I was checking for comet news in between recording, this seemed to fit with the feeling of the day. I decided to use the comet mission as a metaphor for how to mix the piece.

Synth patch for second commission

The first part has a slower undulation and a slowly looping cycle, which I imagined like orbiting the solar system. Then it goes to a much tighter, shorter loop, like orbiting the comet. Then it goes into a nice low rumble, like rocket engines. Finally, it ends with a very low clicky sound, like the comet might be making. Thinking of it in this way really helped me to organise the material, which had more variation than I would normally use for such a short piece.

Comet patch

However, a problem became apparent when I tried to listen on my laptop’s internal speakers. The nice low rumbles were too low for my speakers! However, in the meantime, an actual comet sonification was released by the ESA, which is striking for a few reasons, including how beautiful it is and how much it sounds like synthesis! I decided to emulate it, with a pulse wave and white noise going through a resonant bandpass filter, with (alas, digital) reverb added on in the mix. This filled up the top frequencies and also gave it a good cadence at the end. It definitely made it a stronger piece, but I think it overwhelmed the undulating
Normally, in such a short piece, I would have three closely related ideas. This piece, however, has enough ideas for a piece two or three times as long. However, if I were going to do one thing different, it would be to use a different reverb. I’ve been wishing I had spring reverb for more than 20 years now, so maybe it’s time to finally give in.
There are a lot of reasons you might pick to commission a piece of music, like just because you want to be a patron of the arts! Commissions also make great gifts. If you order in November, delivery is guaranteed in time for Hanukkah or Christmas!

Sounding Good

Last night, I decided to do the final mixdown of the latest piece while sat in my living room, through my internal speakers. I recorded a bunch of sounds that used my low pass filter, because it’s really got a very nice, Moog-y sound. What the sounds don’t have are high frequencies, because of the filtering. Which means when I went to mix them, there was nothing at all coming out of my speakers.
It happens to be the case that, as laptop speakers go, mine are particularly bad. But, judging from the statistics of people reading this blog, most of you aren’t on mac either. When I got this computer, I told myself that the terrible internal speakers didn’t matter, because I would never use them and would always plug into better speakers. That’s what I told myself, at least. The reality is that I sometimes listen to stuff, even noise and other non-pop music, through the internal speakers. And it’s not reasonable to make somebody a commission and then dictate that they have to use special speakers to listen to it. I’m going to have to record a bunch of new stuff, with higher frequencies in it.
This issue of mixing for laptop (or earbuds or internal phone speaker) was first brought up in popular music by Bjork in her 2001 album Vespertine, which was specifically mixed to sound good on a mac laptop. In the 13 years since, all of pop music has followed her. If you’ve ever wondered why bass lines seem to be missing from most top-40 dance-y singles, this is why. They don’t sound good coming out of an internal laptop speaker or internal phone speaker and a lot of ear buds distort them.
Of course, all of pop music is, on some level a response to technology. singles are the length that they are partly because of the durations of wax cylinders – the first recording medium. But as a bass player, a tuba player and a composer, I have some nostalgic feelings for low notes. I think the answer to the conundrum is to mix carefully – make sure the piece sounds good coming from just laptop speakers, but leave in the low tones, so when people put it through better equipment, they get a nice surprise.
If you or someone you know wants to make a commission and don’t care about laptop speakers, let me know, and I’ll subwoof it up! Otherwise, you’re getting music engineered to sound good no matter how you play it. Noise music commissions make great gifts for people, whether they’re low-fi or high-fi! If you order in November, delivery is guaranteed in time for Hanukkah or Christmas!

Do you love noise music? Do you have fashion? Drop me an email if you’d like your image to be in forthcoming posts about noise and fashion

Gluten Free Noise!

All noise music compositions are 100% gluten free and contain no soya based fillers, and are suitable for vegetarians. One listener asks:

My friend is allergic to nuts and to noises made with nuts. For example, he cannot listen to the Nutcracker. Is your music processed in a facility that also processes nuts? Is it possible to commission a noise piece with no trace amounts of nut noises?

Yes, this is possible!
For people with such, ahem, severe nut allergies, any music recorded in or previous to 2006 may contain traces of nut sounds. An audit, undertaken this morning, indicates that all music from 2007 onwards is entirely nut-free. If you have any specific allergies, for example, to nut sounds or equal temperament, please make this clear when placing your order. (Some pieces on my podcast may contain traces of 12 tone equal temperament, but none of the past commissions do.)
Commissioned pieces of music make great gifts for hard-to-shop for people! Delivery is guaranteed in time for Hanukkah or Christmas. Order now! The introductory price of £5 will only last until Thursday.

Do you have any questions of your own? Let me know and I’ll answer them in a forthcoming post!

Do you love noise music? Do you have fashion? Drop me an email if you’d like your image to be in forthcoming posts about noise and fashion

Sustainability

Someone on Diaspora asked me: if I only use recorded sounds once, how does this effect sustainability of my music?
This is an interesting question! While the sounds themselves are not recycled, this actually does effect my disk space usage. Once a piece is done, its done and I don’t need the source sounds any more, so I have no need to keep them around. This means that at the end of creating a minute of noise, I have, usually, an uncompressed file and a compressed Mp3 (plus whatever file format the commissioner wants for themselves). A minute of AIFF or WAV runs up to 11 MB and the MP3 is around 1MB, so this really takes up very little hard drive space. (Indeed, the Mp3 could fit on a floppy disk!!)

recycled synthA recycled synth I saw on Sunday.

There are other concerns in sustainability however, one of the most important is e-waste. Every time you get rid of an old computer, it needs to be disposed of without causing pollution. This makes disposal a challenge. Indeed, getting a new laptop involves a fair amount of pollution and may also include conflict minerals. I’d say upgrading hardware is a greater sustainability issue than hard drive space might be. How does this interact with my music?

  • Digital Music – This has the greatest potential for e-waste, however, my laptop is already 4 years old and I have no plans to upgrade it, because it is fast enough to do what I want. I write my own programs in SuperCollider to digital audio. When I started doing this, more than a decade ago, I had to be smart about efficiency, so I could get everything to run in real time without maxing out my processor. I really have never run into this issue at all with my current laptop – I feel like the upgrade cycle is now more driven by graphics. I run Ubuntu Studio, which also specifically supports older laptops. Should this laptop die, I would probably get a used one. Indeed, I’d look for the very same one I have now.
  • Acoustic – I mentioned using sounds from all kinds of various locations as possibilities in acoustic pieces. However, these were gathered while I was already in the area. I try to avoid flying as much as possible. Since I don’t re-use sounds, putting together an acoustic piece frees up space on my hard drive.
  • Analogue – when I bought my synthesiser, 15 years ago, I also bought a computer at the same time. I still use the synthesiser all the time. Analogue hardware doesn’t go obsolete and doesn’t require upgrading. When I get new modules, it’s to add new functionality, not to replace what I’ve already got. For people who want to make electronic music, analogue gear has a higher upfront cost, but outlasts digital. I expect my synth is less than halfway through it’s usable life. Planned obsolescence and the e-waste created by that is just not an issue.

Commissions are ecologically friendly and make great gifts! Digital-download-only commissions are a perfect gift for for Green friends and family who want to avoid clutter. Delivery is guaranteed in time for Hanukkah or Christmas. Order now! The introductory price of £5 will only last until Thursday.

Do you love noise music? Do you have fashion? Drop me an email if you’d like your image to be in forthcoming posts about noise and fashion