Goldberg Cosmetica - Redux

I'm taking a film scoring class this semester, and our midsemester project is to compose audio for a video of our choosing. I basically trolled vimeo to find an excellent video by Lukas Vojir, who is graciously allowing me to repost his video with new audio. The original video can be found on vimeo, along with interesting information about the concept and its execution.



The idea behind the audio is an emulation of a Goldberg machine through sound. "Mechanisms" of the machine are assigned musical loops that are carried out through the remainder of the piece.

Most all of the sound effects were recorded by me personally; quite a few are buses and vans that pass by my apartment. Some effects are extended tuba technique. All the bells are glockenspiel notes that I recorded last semester. Most of the instruments are recorded in Reason and then imported into Cubase (not using Rewire, I've pretty much decided Rewire is the devil because I often inadvertently change the tempo in Cubase by opening both programs simultaneously). I feel like there's probably a little too much reverb through the whole thing.

The voice in the composition is mine: I recorded the loop twice as slow as song's tempo, then increased the sample's tempo so it was at the right tempo and the voice was twice as high. Then I pitch shifted it down an octave. The result is something that sounds a little more like a trumpet and a little less like an inexperienced vocalist :)

I'm not purposefully trying to include my voice in all my compositions, it's more that I want to work with complex waveforms, and don't have a vocalist handy when I need to record something. And of course midi voice is out of the question.

The audio was exported from Cubase and synced with the video via VirtualDub... this probably wasn't the best way to do it, since you lose quality in the conversion process. All in all, it didn't turn out that bad seeing as it was my first actual foray into film scoring.

I ended up finishing the project 2 weeks before it's due, mostly because it's the most interesting of all my homework projects. If only I were as ahead in my other classes too.