Medium Specificity - Electric Bass Guitar

Medium Specificity Project

For this project, I decided to produce a piece with my recently acquired bass guitar and experiment with simple and sustained notes and plucking techniques to explore how manipulating these different methods of creating music with a bass guitar can effect the music itself.

I decided to start the piece with how playing the bass starts for me – turning on the amp and plugging in the guitar. I start with a click of the on switch and let the exposed cable make its natural noise before being plugged into the guitar. I found that the static created by the exposed cable contributed to the experimental nature of the piece and showed that this part of the process of making music with a bass guitar can sometimes be a part of the music created. 

I then made the piece with three notes – A, E and D. I began by simply tapping my finger on the fifth fret of the E string to create a short A note, and then by plucking the A string at the same time, and by allowing that noise to sustain over the tapping of the E string I found that I had an interesting effect on my hands. I then repeated the process to the same effect with the seventh fret on the A string (E) while plucking the E string, and then finally with fifth fret on the A string (D) while plucking the D string.

I then bookended the piece by ending it with the amp being turned off, as the piece began with the amp being turned on.

Something that I kept in mind as I worked on this was that I was making a piece without form – the three notes I play really don’t qualify as musical except for their rhythm. Since I have no real songwriting ability, I was happy to let my lack of experience lend itself to creating something experimental and formless for this project.

I didn’t know this at the time I first experimented with my bass, but I found that I was trying to recreate sounds from “One of these Days” by Pink Floyd. The piece begins with an understated yet rhythmically powerful bass line that serves as a great foundation for a really energetic song. The main difference between my piece and song with that bass line is that mine stands alone and without other instruments. Thus, my approach was to attempt to make a piece with a bass line that could stand independently. I feel that I succeeded with this, as my piece presents itself as an experiment with simple notes that lay under the same sustained note, as well as an acknowledgment that any music created with an electric bass guitar such as mine begins with the delivery of electricity to the instrument, and ends when that supply is cut off.

Historical Piece - Alien Missile Crisis

Script PDF

One of the first things I wanted to know when given this assignment was that this script would be purely written for creative purposes, and know that I could write essentially whatever I wanted.

I first came up with the idea for Cuban aliens and a CIA agent sent on a mission to kidnap Castro because in real life, my great-grandfather was the director of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere operations and had even orchestrated a plot to assassinate Castro. He was also involved with the Bay of Pigs.

I also have a lot of interest in the Cold War. I find it a fascinating time in history because it was pretty much the closest we have ever been to completely annihilating the world through nuclear war. One of my favorite tidbits about the Cold War is about Stanislav Petrov, who worked at a nuclear early-warning system facility when he received a report that up to five missiles were being launched from the United States. The report was obviously faulty, but Petrov had no way of knowing that for sure, and had to make the decided whether or not to retaliate, and send the world into a real nuclear apocalypse. He assessed the data, and correctly deduced that the report was inaccurate, and thus saved the world.

With this historical piece, I decided to take some of these events that happened in real life – a CIA director, and the fate of the world resting in the hands of an individual – and try to tell a revisionist story about what would happen if Castro was actually an alien sent to Earth after the first time a nuclear device was used in a time of war, and if the man sent to (in this story) kidnap him was completely incompetent (in contrast to Petrov) and possibly ensured the world’s doom.

And, while the story is revisionist and fictional, I still feel that it communicates the overall absurdity of the cold war. So much of what drove the Cold War was simply paranoia, and the fact that in real life the fate of the world rested on one individual who was, by some miracle, rational enough not to retaliate, highlights how absurd the Cold War was. By telling a story that is in its own way absurd and over the top I feel I communicated a very real and still frightening aspect of the Cold War.

Like previous projects in this class, this project was collaborative, which was once again an enriching experience. I once again had to subject my idea to someone else’s interpretation, though it was much more comfortable than the Round Robin as Morgan and I could actively collaborate together, bounce ideas off of each other, and find a balance between an outrageous story with some historical background. I feel that if I was writing this on my own I would have gone too far with the outrageous aspects of the story, and having an other person working with me who may have had a more balanced approach to telling the story made the story better.

Process Piece - Hadouken

Process Piece
The piece is about a micro process that we magnified to reveal its specific kind of labor. The process is the game-controller inputs that initiate a special move in the fighting-competition video game, Street Fighter II. This is something so twitchy and tiny and specific that an onlooker would overlook it completely, only seeing the flashy moves appear on the TV screen. Removing the visuals was a happily appropriate restriction that placed the emphasis on the sounds of clacky joysticks and buttons. At full speed, the sound of thumbs flicking and tapping at the controller is still unrecognizable. What the recording contains is a string of audio peaks that document the precise movements of thumbs required to perform a special attack. Once those buttons are pressed, a recorded voice shouts “Hadouken!” A blue fireball would fly across the television screen at this point and that’s what an audience would see fleetingly and then forget.

Working on this process piece was another way to learn more about collaboration and exploring new ideas, and like the round robin project, pushed us out of our comfort zones. For example, the video game aspect of this project was familiar to one of us and new for another, and we both explored different senses of humour in a way that was new and eye-opening.

The human labor of this process is the rapid micro-movements of thumbs on a controller. It felt like we were channeling Angry Video Game Nerd, who painstakingly describes tiny details and blows them out of proportion. The product of this move is a sound effect, an animation, and the attacking of an opponent. Normally with video game processes an onlooker can only think about the emphatically visible product. The Jack White piece de-emphasized the emphatically aural product that humans would normally focus on when observing an instrument. It instead emphasized construction and invention as human labors that lead to music. The form of our piece reveals the human labor of ‘doing a Hadouken’ by narrating and time stretching the sounds of button presses. At normal speed the process is negligible to the point of seeming hilarious and flailing. Slowed down, repeated, and narrated, the clicks reveal how mechanical the process is. This way, the process is deliciously more respectable and more perverse in its precise furtiveness.

It was also interesting to use audio alone to describe a process that typically would be better described with a visual. But somehow, if even for more comedic effect than practical, audio worked. Slowing down the audio once again also served some sort of purpose - it felt humorous, but it also maximized the use of audio in describing the process. Playing a slow-motion replay allowed the listener to make out the different clicks and button presses one more time. And finally, playing the same track over an actual example of the Hadouken move in action served as a punchline, so as to emphasize both the precision required to execute the move and the humour of the mini-process.