'Towards One' was composed for and presented at the Music and Mulitmedia Technology Graduate Show in Trinity College, Dublin. August 1998.

Towards one is the title for a music and video piece composed by Maura McDonnell. It was created with the aid of extensive digital technology in both the music and video platforms. These pages illustrate the techniques, ideas and approach taken in composing the music. (Pages on the creation of the video will be presented here soon) Still images belonging to each section of the piece illustrate each page. The composition can be heard in its entirety here, the rest of these web pages explain how different parts of the overall piece were built up, what kinds of digital sound synthesis techniques were used and what kinds of processing, transformation and mixing were used. The Sounds were designed using the Kyma sound design software and Capybara hardware from Symbolic Sound.

Full Piece: towards one

Towards one (8 Minutes, 923k)

The piece is consists of four different parts.
The first part, Inward is an exploration of timbre and rhythm, it consists of three sections. The video for the first and third section was made with the music, they evolved together. The video for the second and main section was made after the music and hence follows the music.
The second part, Tetra is an exploration of Ancient Greek concepts of harmony and also a musical exploration of tone and timbre. It consists of two pieces composed seperately and superimposed on top of each other.
The third part Spheres is based on the intervals of a perfect fourth, perfect fifth and an octave, that have been realised mainly through two arppegios, it makes use of timbres and tones from the previous pieces.
The fourth part, Outward is also based more loosely on the same three interval as in part three. In summary, this list has links to pages explaining the details of each section/piece, they can also be accessed with the links at the side:

Part One:  Inward - comprises of three sections, noiseone, process1, away.

Part Two:  Tetra - which is a combination of two pieces, beautiful and air. They are both discussed on the page tetra

Part Three:  Spheres - which is one complete piece which is discussed on the sphere page.

Part Four:  Outward - which is one complete piece which is discussed on the noisewhite page.

 

[towards one]  [inward:1]  [inward:2]  [inward:3]  [tetra] 
[spheres]  [outward] 

©1998 Maura McDonnell