Music
| Year | 2009 |
| Time | ~1:47 |
| Size | 1.75 MB |
One of the most frustrating aspects of video game music is its repetitive nature. Players must typically spend an extended amount of time in one area of the game before moving on, and each area has traditionally contained a single track that loops continuously. Listening to the same music over and over becomes irritating, especially if the player fails at the task necessary to continue and is further delayed in unlocking a new level and its music.
| Year | 2009 |
| Time | 2:12 |
| Size | 3.03 MB |
For this project, I selected a segment of video from a BBC documentary called Galápagos: The Islands that Changed the World, stripped the audio, and composed my own. It depicted sea turtles eating algae underwater, then swimming on the surface; by the end, it had zoomed out to an aerial view of the archipelago. Unfortunately, I don’t have the rights to distribute the video, but here’s the music to it.
| Year | 2009 |
| Time | 2:59 |
| Size | 4.11 MB |
Good texts for art songs are difficult to find. I was playing around with some Percy Shelley poems, but then, as I was looking through Brandon Bird’s website, I found the Letters to Walken. “An Acquaintance?” Year 2 caught my eye, and the rest, as they say, is awesome.
| Year | 2009 |
| Time | 1:06 |
| Size | 4.61 MB |
This was a project for my Electronic Music course. We were required to write a soundtrack for any of several provided videos in the public domain. I selected footage of someone’s vacation to the Grand Canyon. The music consists of polychords and extended tertian chords in piano and strings, a solo cello, a subtle synth, and my voice, all slathered in reverb and/or delay. The sounds come from a Kurzweil K2000. The video? Who knows.
| Year | 2008-2010 |
De Rerum Natura is an epic poem written by the Roman philosopher Titus Lucretius Carus (ca. 99-55 BCE). We know little about Lucretius’s life beyond the fact that he was an adherent of Epicurus, a Greek philosopher who had lived two centuries before him. The poem, written for and dedicated to Lucretius’s friend Gaius Memmius, sets forth and expounds upon many of the ideas of Epicureanism – that the universe is governed by the motion of atoms, that we must conquer fear (particularly that of death), and that humanity must achieve its own salvation rather than petitioning it from the gods.
| Year | 2008 |
| Time | 4:41 |
| Size | 6.44 MB |
Animus is an experiment in rhythm. The beats are divided unevenly, a feature which is exploited to change the tempo with mathematical precision. The harmony, while comprised of simple chords, moves in unorthodox ways. Overall, however, the atmosphere or emotions evoked by the piece are of primary importance. The modernistic techniques described above are used to add an element of unpredictability to this atmosphere.
| Year | 2007 |
| Time | 5:26 |
| Size | 7.48 MB |
For solo piano. This is something of a tribute piece for Douglas Adams, one of my favorite human beings. The harmonies I use are tertian block chords, but they move in non-functional ways, often to accompany octatonic passages. It was performed live on November 29, 2007 by Nicole Valadez and on November 16, 2009 by Saul Iruegas.
| Year | 2006 |
| Time | 5:51 |
| Size | 8.01 MB |
Catch-22, a piece for unaccompanied flute, was my first assignment for sophomore composition lessons. I was asked to write a solo piece in three movements, wherein each movement only used two melodic intervals and their inversions. Movement I uses the minor second, perfect fourth, major seventh, and perfect fifth; Movement II uses the major second, minor third, minor seventh, and major sixth; and Movement III uses the minor second, major third, major seventh, minor sixth, and the tritone. I somehow managed to make things sound surprisingly tonal. It was premiered on November 30, 2006 Natalie Duncan. This recording from November 16, 2009 features Jeremy Jimenez.