SELECTED WORKS
Here are a few of my most recent works to give a sense of what I’m all about!
Supernova
It’s amazing what creativity a new toy will spark! I picked up a new soft synth and as I was modifying the parameters, I found that the patches I was designing were unabashedly neon. So I wove them together in an overly emissive impression of the sounds of my youth. There was something strangely cathartic about denying my muscle-memoried sonic sensibilities and sojourning toward the posterized purple sun setting on the horizon.
Tested
A perusal through the vocal samples in Nuendo led me to this combination of lyrics which I found particularly poignant at the time. With a little pitch shifting and audio warping, I was able to spin a melody out of those samples - and then a short piece from that melody.
Flow
Early in 2021, I had the opportunity to record and sample my Grandparents’ baby grand piano. One thing I love about the samples is that I can hear the distant, and not too distant sounds of my extended family going about their business in the other rooms; a permanent reminder of their presence in my life and influence on my musical development. Those piano samples have become my go-to piano library to improvise on and write with. When I sat down to write this piece at the end of that year, I was reflecting on wind chimes, and how complex they can sound with only the handful of tones they can produce…and thus became a poor impression of such a reflection.
Ninetieth
Here’s one I wrote in January 2021. As I did in my University days, I enjoy taking names and basing compositions around them. I hadn’t actually used that method since 2013, so it was a joy to return to those techniques. The name is Geraldine Stocco, my maternal grandmother’s maiden name, who’s father was a Sicilian immigrant and composer. I wrote this as a tribute to her and her father’s legacy as musicians and creatives.
Opening Whispers
A composer I was able to work with in the past finished a feature film a couple years ago, and the score featured a saxophone ensemble and orchestra. I found the score to be quite moving and a neat use of a relatively unconventional instrumentation in film music. So I sliced a couple samples of saxophone passages from the score (one from the opening titles and another from a cue entitled, Whispers), did some radical sound design on those, and programmed a virtual instrument with the results. I mapped several layers of different sounds to both the expression and mod wheel MIDI CCs, and it turned out to allow for a great range of expression. This is a demo track I put together of what the instrument can do. The whole piece consists of only a single instance of the virtual instrument, with no additional processing.
The Collector
A friend of mine approached me to write a score for his short film in development and based on the script, I wrote this little sketch of sorts outlining the overall narrative. The climax of the story occurs just as the protagonist puts a tea kettle on, and the whistle is blowing as the drama unfolds. With my foray into sound design, I’ve been dabbling in some field recording, so I thought it would be interesting to feature the sound of a kettle whistle in the piece. I recorded my own tea kettle, manipulated the recordings, and turned it into a virtual instrument. Everything except for the strings and synth percussion (another sound I designed) is a result of the kettle recordings.
PULL
A few months ago, I met a visual artist interested in doing some collaboration with me, and a handful of his works are interesting paintings done by spinning a pendulum over the canvas which create really beautiful layered spiral patterns. Inspired by that, I designed a bunch of sounds to specifically depict the nature of the lines and the movement of the pendulums over the canvas, which pick up speed (though merely perceptually in real life) as the pendulums draw closer to equilibrium.
