Notes on my album "Intra (Early Ambient 2010-11)"
Stream Intra on Spotify or Youtube Music, or purchase it on bandcamp (PWYW)!
History of the Album
Intra is a collection of ambient music I made in my first year of college (Fall 2010- Spring 11) after taking some Computer Music courses with Howard Sandroff at the University of Chicago. The summer after that I would shift interest to making games and music for games with tools like PxTone and Reaper, so this album is particularly special in that it was before I moved to primarily melody-based composition.
Sandroff is an early composer of electronic music - he would tell stories about sleeping overnight, waiting for room-sized synths to process punch-cards and create sounds. His course focused around the history of electronic music and ambient music-making: technical knowledge that I had not encountered in my experience with high school orchestra and score-focused composition tools like Finale Notepad.
Having taught electronic music courses myself now, I find that Sandroff's pedagogical approach was interesting: instead of starting us with the DAW - and perhaps trying to port over typical composition methods - chord blocking on pianos/guitars with drum loops and pop structure - we started with Max/MSP. For the uninitiated, it's a bit like 'Photoshop for synths' - you can drag and drop little icons and they will create and filter sounds. You can connect keyboards to them to create instruments. These little canvases in Max/MSP are called "patches," a nod to the vocabulary of hardware-based synth setups.
The courses I took were focused around creating patches, playing, performing, and learning about the fundamentals of sound synthesis, as well as learning its history and listening to representative 'computer music' like Pierre Boulez and understanding the composers’ artistic aims.
Being exposed to this was freeing: for a long time I had an intuitive sense that being a performer on violin or a piano wasn't for me. I liked listening to and playing music, but the life of a performer seemed like not the relationship I wanted with music. Compared to composing classical music - which seemed tied to institutions and hard to break into - seeing this history of electronic music felt like something I could participate in. (Seeing sites like OC Remix, or blogs like Pitchfork covering that early wave of "bedroom" composers, was similarly encouraging).
Using Max/MSP to make ambient music and 'soundscapes' is a very raw form of sound-exploration. The synths I made could take me from piercing sine waves to flickering waves of static, and it was exciting to see that a simple program could create all of that. Some of the songs on this album are direct recordings of a performance with my patches. The course was a great environment: everyone was learning, there was very little judgment, and Sandroff gave useful feedback and encouragement.
In retrospect, all that experimentation and instrument design was a great foundation for making game music. The understanding of how simple sine-wave generators can stack and combine to produce complex sounds is transferable to listening to a sample and building an intuition for how to process it to get other sounds. The kind of flexibility that comes with electronic music composition was just what I was looking for in music!
Ambient music makes an appearance on all of my OSTs. Of course, Intra is a very early work, but I hope there will still be interesting connections to be made with other early songs like the ambient songs from Anodyne's OST (Space, Woods, Nexus, etc)
Even though I don't consider myself an Ambient composer, I think Ambient music is basically the wellspring of any game soundtrack work. There's a tendency for Max/MSP music like this to sound 'dark' and 'space-y', and I would agree - to me it's a perfect comparison: because the raw, chaotic sound-universe of basic sound waves and noise IS dark and expansive. To me it's the sound of 'potential' and the kind of thing that a composer can then draw down and distill into the more familiar forms and structures of melodic music.
On Ambient Music
Through the process of compiling Intra, I found out that some streaming platforms ban Ambient Music, calling them "not music!" The implication of course, is that a commercial pop song, then, is more 'music' than ambient music. The question I'd then ask is: what makes pop music 'music?' And maybe this photo:
What does a commercial pop song with its expensive marketing campaigns and cool-focused music videos represent? I wonder!
Beyond the tangible planets of traditional music and melodies is a vast space from which all other sounds can be found. On the simple level these can just be samples of drums or vocal chops floating around. But as those sounds shift, filter, or melt, you get 'ambient' versions of these - processed, reverbed samples, pitched, etc… it's all these types of adjustments which, when a musician chooses to, can either create an ambient soundscape, or be 'focused into view' in the context of a formally organized song with melodies.
When an electronic musician innovates, even if they don't identify as an ambient musician, there's still a moment within their composing process in which they are creating or combining musical elements in some new, experimental way - the momentary sound of which could be considered 'ambient,' 'experimental' or 'soundscape'-like. Maybe it's just the sound ideas they hear in their head, maybe it's the weird sounds that come out of their speakers as they adjust and fiddle with a synth. An acoustic guitarist nailing down chords will eventually create decisions and focus from the discordant, "ambient" half-plucking of nearby chords. Vocalists might mumble melodies to themselves until hitting upon the right articulation which they then polish into a chorus. Even if their music doesn’t sound like ambient music, their minds were tapping into that universe at some point.
Ambient music is foundational to all sound - it haunts and underlies all music. After all, from the moment we're born we're inescapably surrounded by soundscapes and and the ambient music formed by our environment.
Notes on the Album
Most of the songs were made with Max/MSP patches, performed via Arduino hardware interfaces or MIDI keyboards, sometimes recorded and edited in ProTools. I went through and rebalanced/EQd the songs for a better overall listening experience but they're pretty much the same as they were originally!
The songs have all been renamed and re-ordered to better fit an album, as well as help fit the sort of teenage broodingness these songs have. I included the original filenames below and rough date of 'release' here as well.
Lastly, the title is a nod to my 2013 game Anodyne's prototype name, Intra. Although this album has no direct relation to either (as it proceeds them), I think you can hear its influence on some of the ambient tracks on Anodyne and my other ambient work (see this Spotify Playlist:
The album photo is from early 2011, it's of the studio at my college which had ProTools. I would sometimes use this studio to work in. It was quite nice and quiet to escape here from all of the more technically-minded courses I was taking, although I wonder if the technical difficulties of dealing with so much hardware colored my preference for minimal hardware setups…
Track Notes
Other than looping the song in the background, another fun way to listen to ambient music - and how we practiced it in my college class - is to actively listen to it. It's fun to listen to ambient music and imagine yourself in a landscape. Can you hear the patterns in the song at which point I switched to a different style of performance? Where do you hear the different 'ideas' as shifting within the song? Even if you don’t ‘understand’ an ambient song - and it can be tricky at times - there’s still something nice about appreciating a unique collection of sounds.
Genesis ("Composition") - 2010/11/26
This was the final project for my first class, recorded in real-time from Max/MSP, and I think processed in protools with reverb. These live recordings are a method of music-making I practically never use nowadays for whole songs but it's fascinating to essentially get a whole 'orchestra' of instruments out of a single patch with different presets. I had notes that would dictate roughly what I should be doing at any given time. I still use similar techniques for creating certain effects in songs.
This song has three 'acts' to it. From 0-1:35 there's a focus on slowly oscillating patterns. From 1:35-2:35 there are these huge waves of static, followed by a more lonesome voice. With very few background elements, from 3:00 onwards the song takes on a more 'cavernous' feeling before harking back to some of the oscillating/pulsating rhythms of the beginning.
Eclipse ("ambient1_experimentalloops1) - 2011/01/05
I think this song and "Smiling" came about during some free time in winter break. I believe I was using ProTools here for some stuff like Delay and overlays. The sounds are my desk noises! I think I had a wonky recording setup at the time.
I like how this song feels like 2 or 3 unique voices standing in spatial relation to each other - there's a nice sense of background/foreground. A lot of this music can sound like the 'surface of an alien planet' and I think this song fits the bill well. Can you pick out the 'high', 'mid' and 'low' frequencies in the composition?
Smiling ("beat_strangebeat") - 2011/01/05
I think this was another ProTools song, the automation and rhythm sound sort of DAW/precise-y. It sounds a lot like I had some loop and I was just doing filter sweeps over it to create a 'song.' This song feels sort of ritual-esque, like robots doing a sacrifice in a cave or something.
Lattice ("end") - 2011/02/19
This, as well as Pluto and Abyss, were three songs I made for a friend's short film. The film was quite abstract from what I remember, with someone crawling on a lawn. I remember the film was screened in our dorm room and the speakers were distorting so badly. Some friends were laughing - either at the film or the music - and I can't exactly blame them - but it was also really cool to hear my music playing in a live context.
This song feels a bit more 'song' like to me, maybe how I'd approach ambient now. The little bird-sound voice comes in and out at intervals like a performance while there's that dark carpet of brooding noise below everything.
Abnormal - 2011/03/17
This was a song made for the final for my 2nd computer music class, the focus being more on other techniques of synthesis/DAW processing. I guess in this case it was messing with vocal samples? Messing with samples is a great way to get new sounds and instruments. It's really fun to see what you can come up with, and then try and work it into the context of a song. Many of my songs usually feature 'new' instruments, in this regard.
One fun fact is that this was a collaborative song with friend Coby Ashpis, who is also still making music and performing live! See this video. Neither of us are really ambient musicians, but please enjoy this historical artifact nonetheless.
For fans of games like Shin Megami Tensei, I think some monster death noises are made with similar techniques of wobbly vocals.
I really like the lower elements that come in around 1:08. Actually, the processing around 1:08-1:20 remind me of some of the ambient, sci-fi esque sound design work done on the Metroid Prime 1/2 OSTs, one of my childhood favorites.
A fun part of ambient music making is how easy it is to come up with weird, otherworldly groans and moans. The human voice is a very flexible thing!
Pluto ("comp2") - 2011/01/17
Like "Composition", this was a song recorded off of a Max/MSP patch in one go. I may have used this same patch to help write the short film songs on this album.
I like how in the intro I use these delayed sounds that then fade out into just the background drone. It gives the feeling of glancing and looking over a landscape, wondering about what each point of interest is. I think my focus this time around must have been about finding and isolating these interesting 'sounds'. A lot of these songs use comb filtering, which is something that can really bring out strange qualities in a sound by selectively narrowing in on certain frequencies.
Overall this song feels like walking through a 'sound gallery', like little experiments on display.
Abyss ("crawl") - 2011/02/13
This had a ridiculous amount of distortion I had to tweak to make listenable (imagine it on those dorm room show-and-tell night's speakers…).
Sometimes it's just fun to see what you can do with a single drone sound. Other examples of this approach would be the "windy interior" songs from Even the Ocean.
Bedroom ("maybe, protools - rwerew") - 2011/03
As far as I can tell this is the last 'complete' song I did before moving onto PxTone (chiptune) and REAPER that June. The title is a nod to one of the codenames for an early area in Anodyne, where the character would go to sleep in their bedroom, and then wake up in a dream world.
This song in particular feels really song-y - the background drone has a distinct rhythm, with the organ-like pulsations coming in at intervals.
Primeval ("Intro walk1") - 2011/02/19
I quite like the starry and monstery-groan sounds in this one. If the high-frequencies of ambient music are like stars and light then the dark low groans are like the dark matter in between, the vocal-esque sounds in between, the organic life…
I like how this song has a dramatic arc. Like you're walking on the edge of an alien forest and you walk straight into a grove with wailing cicada-like organisms.
Conclusion
I hope you found this peek into my musical history interesting. It’s always fun to revisit old songs. In fact, this release is part of my ongoing archival project to document most of my songs through standalone/streaming releases. I still have quite a few to go, but at least there’s one more down!