An Act of Listening
My name is Tom Lyne and I am a bassist, sound designer and composer. In this podcast I will have conversations with friends and colleagues where we talk about some of my composition and sound design. We will be exploring what it means to commit an act of listening.
An Act of Listening
An Act of Listening EP2 - Water Bass
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This episode explores a work from Tom's Sonables II collection called 'Water Bass'. Guest musician and producer Sophie Bancroft asks the questions and the work in question explores the sounds and interpretations of local Midlothian burn called Tynewater.
Hello there. My name is Tom Lyne and this is an act of listening. Sophie Bancroft, welcome to the studio.
SPEAKER_06Thank you.
SPEAKER_00Thanks for coming in. Today we're going to talk about some of my music. We'll have a listen to the track, we'll talk about the music a bit, and then we'll listen to the track at the end of the show.
SPEAKER_06Okay.
SPEAKER_00So this track is called Waterbass, and it's off that collection known as Sonnables 2.
SPEAKER_06I like that last little drip. The first question for me is where was that water recorded?
SPEAKER_00That water was recorded, so I received a hydrophone for a gift. Very lovely one, a French handmade water phone. Hydrophone. And that was an afternoon down in the middle of winter, it was like February or January, down in Tynewater at the river. Burn, as we call it. In Vaugrie or In Vogry. Well, actually, just more towards the Creighton side. I was sort of just across the road from where Creighton Castle would be. And it was an interesting one because the water was really high, it'd been raining a lot, and it was boiling and active as as it can be. And then that was me kind of playing with the hydrophone a little bit. You can throw it in and just let it sit, and you get a steady sort of thing, and then I started sort of getting creative with it and throwing it into the current and letting it float down. Um so the recordings sort of form the backbone of the whole thing. I take the audio recording, the original audio recordings, and bring them into Ableton, which is where I can then play with them a little bit and we listen to them and analyze them a little bit, and start off I think by just using it fairly straight in this case. This is you can almost hear me sort of tossing it in the water.
SPEAKER_06So did you how did you choose which segment of the recording to use?
SPEAKER_00I leave that a little bit random because there was there was quite I was there all afternoon, so I've got extensive amounts of it. And when I bring it in, what I'm really looking at is, you know, uh we're looking at the computer screen, which we won't have on the podcast, of course, but um this you can see things, events happening on the file, and really I'm just interested in the randomness of it and the and the sort of tone qualities that it creates. Um and as you move through to different places it gets more active or less active. And sometimes there's more percussive sounds, and sometimes there's more of the water gurgling.
SPEAKER_06And how much um effects have you done an EQing have you done of that sound?
SPEAKER_00Well, in this case, that one actually has nothing on it at all. But then I have another track here that has this is where we start getting into EQing it, and I do um granular synthesis, which is a process by which they just break the sound up into tiny little bits and squish it and mush it about, and we get something a little bit a little bit more like this.
SPEAKER_06So it has echoes and has so is that is that ex is that a just a double of the the sort of the naked track? It is. So it it's it's it's like having an effect on the the naked track in the center.
SPEAKER_00If I bring in the naked the regular track as well, you can hear them so it's all working together. It's all working together. Um there is a third track of it, just has another sort of different effect of ply to it. And this sounds a little bit more like a sort of a mad computer type sound. But what you start to get with this is tonality. So by I'm using a spectral resonator, which whatever, it just sort of again it breaks the sound into tiny little bits and it applies EQ and overlapping and it searches for sort of like harmonic frequencies and then enhances that. So do you do this effecting before you start composing? Yeah, this is the beginning of the whole thing. All of the music came out of working on sound effects and developing the sound effect libraries, which are for the most part just the natural sounds by themselves. This is me kind of having fun with the music in my own time afterwards. So then the the step-on from that. So the those three bits of water, when they're together, you can hear the bangs are sort of the percussive bits. Those are like little washy bits of chords. So one of the tricks that I use is I then take audio and extract MIDI from that. And all MIDI is is a way for um a piano sound or a bass sound or a string sound to be told what notes to play and when to play it. So rather than playing all of this in, I use the original recording of the burn and I turn that into MIDI information, and then I can apply the instruments to it. And that's where we start getting the bass part and some of the keyboard parts that go with it.
SPEAKER_06So what was what was the first instrument sample sound that you used with this? I can remember.
SPEAKER_00I'm trying to remember which is the first, I think. Let's go here. So the first thing I added in was um this bass keyboard bass that you hear here. And then when I got to the electric bass part, I went and I learned those parts. I sort of listened to the randomness, and that's kind of how I come up with uh adding in the bass here. There we go.
SPEAKER_06Definitely one, possibly two motifs that you used at various points. Is that is is are my ears deceiving me or did you use repetition?
SPEAKER_00We did uh there were there were motivations. That that line there that was one of them. So the first part that comes in is the bass part in relation to the water. When I started copying it, and I take the MIDI that comes from the burn, and that drives the bass. I take those same MIDI notes and then spread them across other instruments, and we start getting the keyboards and the other sounds. So in that case, that's kind of a motive that repeats quite a bit of. And I'll have taken that bit and sort of made duplicates of it, and that includes a low-sounding bass, a keyboard sound, and there's drums in there as well, uh, and some cymbals, just sort of in the spirit of like uh growing up in a bit of a jazz world, was always listening to Weather Report. Uh, and it reminds me of some of that.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. So do you do you when you cut those segments, do you do you also take the water segments too?
SPEAKER_00Usually, yes. Yeah. Um, I I don't mind if things start going against each other, but I I do try and maintain that sense that what I'm doing is taking the burn and orchestrating it into something that it never was. Uh because I find that really the thought of that is is really fascinating to me, and it sort of inspires me to sort of keep looking for those sort of relationships.
SPEAKER_06That's an interesting phrase, something that never was, because actually that's what it is.
SPEAKER_00Something that never was.
SPEAKER_06Well, no, that what it's singing is what it is.
SPEAKER_00Exactly, yeah.
SPEAKER_06But it also makes me think that really you should be crediting the the burn. And and the reason for saying that is you know, of you and the burn is that then it it gives more of an understanding that actually this because I I hadn't realized that the melody was from the burn. I thought you'd improvised the melod the you know what you've done melodically.
SPEAKER_00Um I do improvise, but I I really try and listen very carefully to to what the burn is telling me. I mean when I hear just that just the water by itself and and the noises that it makes, those and I know that most people don't really listen this way, but to me I can hear notes and I can hear the shapes of notes and the rhythms and sort of the randomness of it.
SPEAKER_06Well, so how is the how is that bass synth, for example, picked out notes from that then? What what's triggered the actual tones?
SPEAKER_00So if I take this just this track of the burn that we're listening to here, and again we're looking at a a waveform on a screen, but you can see that there are peaks and troughs, and I have no there's no tempo set for this piece. It's it's kind of free time. And as we zoom in, like on a busy point here, it it then starts looking a little bit more of a steady rhythm. Well, not steady, but regular. Yeah. So when you look at it, zoom in enough on this, then you can pick out those high points. And so what the program does when you analyze this and try and turn it into MIDI, it kind of picks out the highest points, or you can adjust it to pick out whatever bits you want. But it picks out sort of the the high points that stand out, and it also tries to figure out if there's a pitch attached to it. And what winds up happening is you get this down here, this bass part. And as you can see, there's not nearly as many notes to it as there are. It's much less than what you have up in the the audio file. But that's also partly me being a little bit um selective, because originally there was a lot more, and then I I started to there were notes that weren't useful or that didn't carry the narrative in the same sort of way. So we'd remove some of that, some of the noise. Um and you can also see where there are parts that are have been repeated that are used as sort of thematic developments. So this go back and add the water into that and then you hear. To me, it's all connected. And that's the in a way that's the joyous thing about doing this to me, is fixing all these things together like this. And then we can come back here and hear it once I've added everything else in. And that's the basis for the whole thing. Um, there's a solo in the middle, which is uh literally uh the hydrophone laying in the bottom of the river at one point. And I thought uh my humorous side thought that would be a fantastic solo. Oh, we have the appearance of guitar.
SPEAKER_06And when what part of the process do you decide what MIDI instruments to use?
SPEAKER_00It's kind of an organic organic development. I get to a point where the audio itself needs something else to it. Um and sometimes I'll grab a bass and try just playing directly at that point, but I'm inspired by sounds, so I have a collection of stuff that allows me to just try different keyboard sounds or orchestral string sounds. I quite like, you know, good cinematic music is built up of a palette of sounds with bass stuff at the bottom, chords in the middle, and melody on the top in some way. In a very rough way, that's kind of how I work. I think about the sound quality of different sections and how they work when they come together. And to be fair, in this case I was putting new strings on a guitar uh and I'd sort of got halfway through the job and it was just sitting against the wall, and I picked it up and it was completely out of tune. But I quite liked the chord, which is where that came from, the the guitar part. I I do not have a strict operating principle other than I start with the original recordings, the the sound recordings.
SPEAKER_06And how how do you decide the length of what you're where did that come in with this piece? How long is this piece actually?
SPEAKER_00It's about it's just over five minutes long. And what originally it would have been much longer. I think after I've been I think most of them tend to have a duration of 10 to 20 minutes, just because I'm using quite long audio samples originally. And that gives me time to to find different sections, and when I come to the editing of let's call it a song, for instance, then I sort of put on my traditional songwriting slash composer head and put it into a format that would make sense to a listener so that you have things that repeat a little bit and start creating a sense of familiarity. Because the music itself is quite out there, can be quite atonal at times, or it can be very expensive in a rhythmic way, and I think to catch listeners, they need to, they don't need to totally understand what they're listening to, but by having Some repetition and some familiarity, and it it gives them something to hang on to as they sort of experience something new. I like things that surprise me that present me with something I've not heard before, so that's kind of what I'm trying to do with the music as well.
SPEAKER_06Do you realise that towards the end of the piece there is a harmonic chord on the bass?
SPEAKER_00On you on your Oh, that I play on the bass.
SPEAKER_06That's the that's um a quote from the the intro to Goodbye Pop by Hat on Joni Mitch Flamingus that Jacob Storis played.
SPEAKER_00Um did you realise that? I don't think I realised that one. I know there's a couple other quotes in there.
SPEAKER_06It's the ding?
SPEAKER_00It's a Oh, the harmonic.
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I don't think I did realise it was a quote, but it was sort of a just something. I mean, it's not really a quote, it's just one it's the f the first one. For every bass player it's just a it's just a harmonic on the open strings across. Uh I don't know if it's a seventh fret or the fifth fret or something.
SPEAKER_06Do you want me to see if it's in the same key?
SPEAKER_00Well, it probably will be because the basses are all tuned in the same. Oh you know what? I've got it right here. Well kind of. Kind of.
SPEAKER_06I mean, you know, since it made me think of that anyway.
SPEAKER_00Since he played all those that's the one. You know, he's the master of all that stuff, really. He owns those, uh, he owns those chords. Everybody else who plays it, you go, oh, that's just like Jaco, but not as good. And same, there's a couple of places where I play chords like that as well. Yeah. But it's it's also because on the you know, like this this song also really features this this electric fretless bass that I've got. You know, there's the chords.
SPEAKER_06And have you notated this piece?
SPEAKER_00No, I've not notated any of this stuff, um, which was the part of the motivation for creating the second the second project that I'm working on, uh, with the hopes of sort of taking the music to an ensemble of some type to play. Uh and when I reached this stage of the project, I was going to start notating things and scoring it for, you know, maybe a small string group and a rhythm section and an electronic artist to handle things like the burn, the sound of the burn, or the sound of the forest, or something. So that's that's kind of in the works. That's something that I would hope to do in the future. Um, notating something like this is a little bit tricky because there's no time to. However, to go from this to notating it, it wouldn't be that difficult. I've had to learn all these parts to play them. Because for the most part, I double everything that the drums or the keyboards or the string section goes around to play. So it I had to kind of go through it and just learn the flow of it without worrying too much about the rhythm, just learn it kind of naturally.
SPEAKER_06Let's hear a bit of the let's hear the beginning bit again. Again, I just want to see where it begins. If there is a rhythmic structure to the water.
SPEAKER_00So this section is actually a call and answer. But the bass, that low is the transcription of the burn, and what I'm playing is sort of in between the notes very much.
SPEAKER_06I mean, there is there is a pulse, actually. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So I'm also introducing a little bit of harmony to the thing at the very beginning. There's a very quiet little minor chord in the background. I've decided I want that tonality to be there, but it's also, as far as I can ascertain from listening carefully, it complements what's going on in the water bit. Um, there's this little section just before the big line that we just heard where the sound of the burn really comes out, and you can hear. I use that bit to to pull some of the string sounds and some of the chords that go with the string. Um, and I think it was right about here. So it's more like that. Was the bit where I had the hydrophone, I was sort of like splashing it through the water. Uh, and you get a real it's like with you splashing the bathwater around, but it has real energy about it. And then adding on all this.
SPEAKER_06It's really like a voice, you know, it's like one of those ghostly voices, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. That's probably how they make the ghostly voice sounds on there. I do like this middle bit here. This will be the solo section. And it was a bit again, that's where I was really playing with the hydrophone in the water and then smudching, smulching it, mulching it, mangling it, changing it. Um, and I believe the guitar was actually possibly your guitar that I just changed the strings on, but it was all out of tune. I was just like put my finger across, and that was the chord that we got. I suppose I love I get used to it because I'm working on it, and so I know the music and I know the parts, and for me it's obvious that it's going that direction. Um I have no idea what it's like for somebody listening to it for the first time.
SPEAKER_06Well, that first bit now I've started thinking about ghostly voices. I keep hearing ghostly voices now. Play that play that bit again. The very first beginning? No, the bit you just played. Right again.
SPEAKER_00Listen to the quite a lot of them, isn't it?
SPEAKER_06There's lovely space in the piece. I like that.
SPEAKER_00Uh it's uh for me it's an education and patience as well, learning how to do this. Cause the first I think everybody who creates music on a computer with software like this, the first thing you do is just make the busiest 16 bars of music you've ever made in your entire life, and and then it takes years to get away from that. Um I also realized playing this section that we after the Ghostly Voices solo. Um again, you can see, we're looking at the waveform here, but you can see the space in between the articulations. And that's partly the technique I use when I'm learning how to play this stuff. Get that playing and watch it and see. Yeah, give you a visual. It's very much a visual way of performing, which is really interesting to do.
SPEAKER_06But that's it's like reading music though, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00Exactly. So reading audio waveforms has become kind of a really interesting way of reviewing a lot of recordings. Some of the recordings I'm doing now, you know, they're overnight recordings of storms and uh locations. So when I pop it into the computer, there can be 12 hours of I can read the waveform and understand, you know, what time of day, what sort of things were happening, and I can go in and look at details, and it's always something, you can see that something has happened, so you can go move to that particular place and investigate it. You think it's the middle of the night and suddenly there's all this activity on one microphone somewhere, so you go and you listen, and a fox or a a cat had come down through the bushes and had knocked the microphone over or something. It's almost like Christmas Day when you get a you've been out recording a storm overnight and get up in the morning and load the files and go, hmm, what's gonna be on this one? I'd never thought of voices.
SPEAKER_06Because it's such an ancient place. Down in Tinewater. And you wonder where like on these ghost programs when they have those, I don't know what they're called, the microphones that record the electric the the electromagnetic disruptions. They sometimes they somehow use frequencies to create voice sounds from it, don't they?
SPEAKER_00They do.
SPEAKER_06I mean I guess that's how that works.
SPEAKER_00It's probably very similar to.
SPEAKER_06Which is actually a very similar process to what you're doing, isn't it? Except that you're not.
SPEAKER_00I'm not trying to catch the ghost necessarily. But maybe you did. Maybe I did. This is called a soma ether. It catches radio waves, it catches disturbance in the electromagnetic fields. So it'll record phones and hard drives and radio signals and all that sort of stuff. And you can it has some rudimentary tuning controls on it, so you can scan a variety of things. You wouldn't hear the radio on this, but you hear the distortion around a radio signal. So that's one way that they do it, so they can set that up and detect disturbance in the field. Um, the other thing that I've been using lately is um this wildlife acoustic microphone, which is for recording bats and insects. Because they're making tones around 56,000 hertz, and human hearing peters out around 20,000, so we can't hear them. But you plug that in and record with that, and it has software that sort of divides the signal down to a hearable range. Um, do you have any more questions about this track?
SPEAKER_06Only what was that voice saying in the solo?
SPEAKER_00I like the dark turn this one has taken.
SPEAKER_06No, but uh it's fantastic. And I I mean it does feel important that you know that that listeners I feel it's important anyway that before one listens to it that one has the understanding of the the link between the the water and the music that's been created.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Yeah, I do too.
SPEAKER_06Because because otherwise it it can't which was kind of how I was interpreting it, uh, you know, an improvised piece with the water as more of a background. Percussive and atmospheric background, whereas actually it's very it's much, much more linked and related than I had given it credit.
SPEAKER_00I'm sure that at the beginning I thought that's what it was, that I was just kind of improvising to a burn. But in the process of then paying attention to what I was doing and really listening, I realized that that was not the case, and I kind of went back and worked on it and developed the idea and then redid it as a much more connected, sympathetic kind of process.
SPEAKER_06And do you feel that this particular track that's been a deeper aspect of it compared to other sounds, or has that happened in all the different soundscapes you've captured in the environment?
SPEAKER_00I think this one is one of the more successful ones to me. It's a good question. I don't have a completely obvious answer, I think. Um each of the tracks, particularly on this collection, this is the second collection, um have very distinct characters because of the different environments that they come from. The current set of recordings that I'm working on is very different again, but I've not had a lot of clarity yet about it. But that comes from really spending some time with it and working on uh each of the individual pieces. So that's what I'm in the process of doing right now. And why we're talking about an older collection, because the new collection is not ready yet. It's forthcoming.
SPEAKER_06But it's important to talk about this collection because it's not been talked about.
SPEAKER_00True. It's great to be able to talk to you about it and to share it and and sort of get into some of the details. It also reminds me how important it is to me. Yeah. Shall we listen to this and call an end to the day? It's been Sophie Bancroft here in the studio talking about my music. A song called a song called Water Bass. So now that we've talked about it and looked at some of the details, we'll listen to it one more time, and um thanks very much for tuning in.