Viva Voce Portfolio
I Just Can't
A collaboration with dance student Frances Orlina. I had a very clear (and unusual) brief for this piece, requiring me to use elements of Tunisian folk music, electric guitar, and samples of Kylie Minogue's voice. Luckily, I found a free Mizwad vst for a convincing sound. I used distortion on the Kylie samples and recorded some guitar lines. It was really fun collaborating with Franc and we met up several times mostly to match the structure of the music to the choreography. It was fulfilling to see dancers move to my work. The part of the piece that I wrote starts at ~5:00.
Reach for the Stars
An homage to cheesy anime intros, I took a lot of influence from J-rock. I wrote a guitar riff that utilises tapping for an angular kind of modern sound. Then I wrote the harmony using a lot of secondary dominants. Finally the melody and lyrics were finished. I tried to be "maximalist" with my orchestration and found some new techniques such as polychords that I think I will continue to use in the future. Performed by the HearNOW ensemble and Isabel Sargon.
score marked score
score marked score
(WIP) Drive
The main seed of this piece is a spectrograph of a truck horn, which creates a very ugly sort of D augmented chord. The whole piece is loosely based around the pitches of that spectrograph, and it frequently comes back to variations of that ugly chord, with moments of consonant resolutions, creating an unpredictable, edgy piece that I'm relatively happy with considering how little I had to start with. I still have to finish the piece and would like to add a few more sections of development. Currently the last couple of bars are merely copy-and-pasted from earlier in the piece.