Week Four 22 FEB 18

Week 4 focused on MIDI effects, Timbre and Instrumentation. First was a text on Ableton Live and how the MIDI effects fall under the categories: Arpeggiator, Chord, Note Length, Pitch, Random, Scale and Velocity. This was a good refresher for me as I have previous experience in Ableton Live through personal experience by creating my own music and watching music producers like Deadmau5 do masterclasses on how they use MIDI effects to create their famous tracks.  It was interesting to see the Walking Dead example and how the effects mentioned above were used in a “professional setting”. It gave me a few tips and pointers of how I can improve my working video of the walking dead intro for submission. I did some small work on my submission while watching the activity video, I mainly just checked my key and tempo and looked at effects that I can personally use for my submission. I also worked on my breathing samples and deleted some as I thought it was too much and overpowering, so I spread them out and timed them with images of the weapons and the zombies which I think creates a bigger effect. In the coming weeks I will add effects to all of these samples. I also found a sample on Splice Sounds of a radio transmission in which I chopped up the static to place it in the background of my composition. The radio transmission I found can be found at the bottom of this blog. I also read a PDF on Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard and the music used and composed for the Dark Knight. During reading this article and watching the video, I found it fascinating about how they went away from using the traditional Batman Theme Song as this Batman is complicated, how Hans doesn’t see him as a superhero and how using the old Theme Song labels him falsely. The thought process of this interests me as I imagine it must have been difficult to go against something so iconic.