Fixed Track (October 2021) 4’00”

Cardiff School of Art and Design // (Max 8 and Cubase 6)

In a repeat collaboration with Cardiff School of Art and Design, Tymhorau (Seasons) was conceived as a composition that could provide an inspiring palette of sound for abstract visual interpretation. The diverse sensory timbres heard throughout are the product of composing with a mixture of acoustic, natural and electronic sources from the outset. Evocative memories from each season guided the composition and its eclectic soundworld into a gapless quartered form. But for the visual artists, it would be left up to them as to how the sound could be depicted in their personal segment of animated imagery.

Tymhorau was selected to feature in the Focus Wales Film Festival in May 2022, receiving an award for best music.

16 Channel Sound, Motion Sensor & Code (March 2019)

Guildhall School of Music and Drama, “Getting it Right? New Music / New Technologies” // (Max 8 & Cubase 6)

Guest contribution to the conference accompanying lobby installation, using modified gramophones, motion sensors and custom software. Responding to the theme of noise, the piece presents conversations with musicians about their experiences of noise in various capacities, with each segment revealed as an expanding loop which layer into each other.

Installation: Torches, Stereo Sound, Code & Live Visuals (May 2018)

Sinfonia Cymru CURATE: #Joyride, Cardiff // (Max 8 & Cubase 6)

Continuing ideas manifested in Homesteaders (2016), Lightbox uses light and space to explore sound, creating a unique musical experience at the control of its audience. The installation runs from a self-coded programme which handles pre-composed elements that are mixed by the analysis of light through a sensor, activating cellular changes in texture, harmony, rhythm, instrumentation etc. to make an evolving continuous composition. Lightbox also featured at the New Music For People and Machines concert at Chapter, Cardiff later in October 2018.

Fixed Track (November 2017) 4’33”

(Cubase 6)

VGM-inspired super deluxe neon music. Played by DJ Adam Walton on BBC Radio Wales in 2017.

Installation: Toy Keyboard, Stereo Sound and Live Visuals (May 2017 & May 2015)

Balance Exhibition 2017 at OXO Bargehouse, London // (Max 7)

Bitesize fun explorations into manipulating live visuals and augmenting sound using a simple accessible musical source and a bit of programming. Fish Food, which was created at the RWCMD Atmospheres festival in 2015, led to the creation of Rajakitana for the Balance exhibition in the Linbury Gallery, Cardiff and OXO Bargehouse, Londdon in 2017. Both incorporate similar generative techniques where pitch, amplitude and textural data from a keyboard produce creative reactions on screen and through its speakers.

Fixed Track (April 2016) 5’00’’

(Max 7 & Cubase 6)

Created alongside its sister piece Socialite, this fixed work was written using experimental sampling software created by the composer. Utilising loop-point based controls as well as pitch alteration and a rhythmic sequencer, the programme provided the ability to generate eccentric manipulations of recorded sound. The pool of samples used were intended to artificially create a natural environment soundscape inhabited by organic life. Outputted material was then analysed and sculpted into composition. Trilobite’s form is linear and based on expanding sounds, building texture and highlighting the timbral changes produced by the process.

Installation: Solo Violin, Code, Twitter & Live Visuals (May 2015)

Violin & Electronics: Daniel SOley // (Max 6)

The MSE incorporates a multiplatform process which combines acoustic performance with real-time data collection. ‘Registered Twitter Developer’ access information enables a code to receive tweets from an individual timeline and recognise tweets directed to a user sent from anywhere in the world. These tweets are transformed into a notated musical realisation via the message’s characters, which serve as data for pitch, rhythm, dynamics, tempo and style. The stream is played live by a solo violinist as the results are generated actively and passively from tweeters contributing deliberately and obliviously to the event. The audience is encouraged to interact through tweeting their own messages to the associated @ account, whilst a display shows the process occurring live alongside the performer. The MSE featured as part of British Science Week at the Techniquest Science Museum, Cardiff in Spring 2015 and later that year within the Install-Enrich-Repeat at RWCMD’s Atmospheres Festival in May.

Fixed Track (October 2020) 3’40”

(Max 8 and Cubase 6)

Gelignite presents a bombastic take on ‘homage’ as it seemingly conveys a bloodline that runs between the sound design in entertainment and its Concrète origins. Retro and futuristic sounds fizz inside a junkyard composition of recycled audio that never repeats itself. The piece toys with juxtaposition further, setting the abrasive against the playful and the object with the abstract. Jolting but fluid gestures, blended and conjoined, natter, sing and squabble in a structure dictated by relentless direction. This language is energised by complex timbres, making a digital experience into something quite physical, mechanical, or maybe even organic.

Gametrak, Stereo Sound & Code (February 2019) ca. 5’00”

TY Cerdd CoDI: Electronic, Bangor Music Festival // (Max 8 & Cubase 6)

Infusing sound with performance art for the Swansea Laptop Orchestra. This narrative solo feature represents the artist’s first explorations with the eye-catching Gametrak ‘Tether’ controller, and handles spatial data in self-coded programming and interpretive choreography to access a novel medium for sonic performance. Together it allows gestures and movement, made at the discretion of the performer, to generate, reveal and manipulate a soundworld inspired by a day dream, as the audience witness a bewildered castaway struggle against fate in a hopeless vessel.

Rubik’s Cube, Stereo Sound, Code & Live Visuals (March 2018) ca. 6’00’’

Sinfonia Cymru CURATE: #BigIdeas, Cardiff // (Max & Cubase 6)

A new mixed media work, inspired by the field of sonification – ‘using audio to convey information or perceptualise data’. As with Dan’s previous features, Kuborithm runs from an experimental self-coded programme, this time to manipulate pitches, tones, rhythms and dynamics determined by the face-twisting process of solving a Rubik’s Cube algorithmically. An augmented visual display also operates in tandem with sound to present the procedures that turn disorder into unity.

Mix (October 2017) 4’33”

Sinfonia Cymru CURATE: #Bowdown, Cardiff // (Cubase 6)

String Ensemble, Stereo Sound, Code & Live Visuals (April 2017) ca. 18’00’’

Atmospheres Festival 2017, RWCMD // (Max 7 & Cubase 6)

The Subscribed is a multiplatform composition manipulated live via the internet, uncovering the shrouded lives of people from an early online vlogging community.

This conceptual multi-platform composition for real-time manipulated video, electronic sound and string ensemble stands unique in its field as a new performance experience, representing the most recent exploration from the composer’s interest in online sociology. The Subscribed embraces at its centre the early online communities of real people that are grown around, nurtured, and influenced by the uploaded lives of internet video personalities. The documentation and responses of one particularly notable community known as the CTFXC have shaped, and in fact operate via social media, the content of this work. Four intrinsic periods from the community’s history formulate and communicate the piece’s movements (Marriage, Growth, Tumour & Divorce), where music, sound design and spoken voice come together in a narrative vision from the composer that portrays the community’s expansion and demise. Changing in method for each movement, quasi-aleatoric textures bleeding across harmonic structures manifest in the string ensemble’s accompaniment - The Subscribed incorporates the concept referred to by the composer as ‘dynamic scoring’ in which (primarily) durational aspects to all elements of the performance are determined by the live stream of tweets from the traceable CTFXC community and the audience who are invited to interact. The Subscribed premiered at RWCMD’s Atmospheres 2017 festival of new music and student composers in the Dora Stoutzker Concert Hall.

Learn more at the Atmospheres Festival 2017 blog page.

Installation: Stereo Sound, Webcam & Film (April 2016)

(Max 7)

Homesteaders is a concept installation work in which the processing of a visual stimulus (a greyscaled muted western film) generates its own musical outcomes. Changes in light levels at observed cross-sections of a screen along with facial recognition and rule-based algorithms allow characteristics of the music including texture, pitch, loop speeds and multiple aspects of dynamics to take shape, producing an ever-revolving sonic texture. The soundworld curated for manipulation is the artist’s own take on the timelessness of the American western, with natural, synthetic, musical and humanoid samples contributing to the tangible soundscape.

Chamber Ensemble and Snapchat Story (July 2015) 7’00’’

NYOW Composers’ Course // The National Youth Orchestra of Wales Players

For small ensemble and prepared recordings, this piece comes from the beginning of a personal exploration into using aspects of social media in conceptual compositions. Embodying a narrative, Thickest Skin incorporates audio from an alluringly melodramatic collection of successive Snapchat videos, posted publicly to the app by one user on Friday 31st May 2015. The clips of speech are presented sequentially in their original 10 second bit format. Elements of pitch, rhythm and theme of the notated material have been derived artistically from the recordings themselves and the music is developed and manipulated to provide a satirical extension to the emotional and acoustic content of the recordings. The work was performed in 3 concerts across Wales at Aberystwyth Old Hall, Bangor University and Cardiff St. David’s Hall and earned the Welsh Music Guild’s Young Composer Award for 2015.

Installation: Stereo Sound & Code (January 2015)

(Pro Tools & Max 6)

My first experiment with Max software, using the voice to perform elements of an original recorded composition. Noise Act featured as part of British Science Week at the Techniquest Science Museum, Cardiff in Spring 2015.

Gametrak, Stereo Sound, Code & Live Visuals (October 2018) ca. 6’00”

Sinfonia Cymru CURATE: #BlownAway, Cardiff // (Max 8 & Cubase 6)

An experimental performance that helped to develop my understanding of harnessing Gametrak hardware as an instrument. The piece’s stimulus was to reinterpret the Mozart Violin & Viola Duo that inspired Czech composer Martinů’s Madrigals, which were performed in the same programme. Both string works are referred to as duels, but in this piece, through fragmenting Mozartian gestures with a pallet of digital techniques, an original meditative soundworld is formed – a ceasefire. In homage to #BlownAway, the clarinet made a prominent feature too, manipulated as samples.

Amplified Violin, MicroKorg, Stereo Sound, Code & Live Visuals (Dec 2017) ca. 5’00’’

Sinfonia Cymru CURATE: #WineGlass, Cardiff // (Max 7 & Cubase 6)

An electro-acoustic exploration into the minimalistic devices of sequence and cycles that references the paralleling and complimentary soundworld of early arpeggiated synthesizers, along with elements of techno and modern dance music – genres Glass, Reich and Adams would help inspire from their movement. An experimental visualizer programme accompanies, operating live, reacting to the music.

http://thesprout.co.uk/blog/sinfonia-cymru-curate-wineglass/

Fixed Track (October 2016) 2’00”

HEAR Exhibition at the Linbury Gallery, Cardiff // (Cubase 6)

“In my own interpretation, this electronic miniature, with inspirations from world, folk and contemporary popular music, connects with the physical and emotional connotations I see in the accompanying portrait. The music’s gentle aesthetic embodies the escapism thought up within the mind of the subject, as she seeks her ‘happy place’ away from distress.”

Soprano Saxophone, Stereo Sound, Code & Live Visuals (Dec 2015)

Sax: Amber Reeve, Electronics (Max 7): Daniel Soley

Mixagra: Mumbai is a cyclical concept work inspired by musical systems and the potential to represent data in performance. The notational pitch material follows the fractal mathematical sequence known as the Infinity Series set within the frame of North Indian classical Raga. Raga characteristics have also emotionally influenced each movement’s saxophone effect choice. Further electronic sound design, affected by picture data and the live saxophone’s performance, is abstractly derived from scenes uploaded by Mumbai social media users.

Performed in January & February 2016, by Amber Reeve at Burning Bright (RWCMD) and The Sleeper Society (Chapter Arts Centre).

Fixed Tracks (2013-14) c. 4’00’’

(Cubase 6)

Back from a simpler time.