These are some pretty terrible songs. But they're my first attempts to create things with sound-editing software. Most of them were composed as midi files, and I left them in that format for file slimness reasons. Everything else is an mp3. Newest songs are at the top.
Rickmarch (midi)
Around 1907-1908, a popular practical joke went as follows: The prankster would call out to his victim that there was something interesting, and possibly salacious, happening in the town square -- for example, perahps there was a lady going about with her petticoats too short, exposing her ankles. The victim would rush out, only to discover that in the square there was only a brass band, led by a familiar red-haired conductor, playing one of its songs that was popular in the 1880s. As it dawned on the victim that he'd been had, the prankster would crow: "You got Rickmarched!"
This is a salsa version of the Värttinä song "Kylä Vuotti Uutta Kuuta (The Village Awaits the New Moon)."
This song has the most guiro of any song I'd written to date. It contains tributes to Bucket Guy and Stuart Davis.
Frankie mentioned once that she had been convinced that there was a song called "Old Sea Bess." So I wrote one.
I'd had this song half-finished and sitting around with the temporary file name "anotherbit" so long that I got attached to the title.
A song named after a town in the Northern Territory, in the style of "Children of Sanchez."
A medley of "Away in a Batcave," "O Little Town of Gotham," and "Biff! Pow! to the World."
I took the melody from a traditional Finnish song (made popular by Värttinä) and turned it into a blues.
I had a dream in which a Finnish band had made a CD called "Rabbit Music" that consisted mostly of drumming.
An attempt at making a "live"-sounding midi.
Another rock song about a road in Worcester.
"Waltzing Matilda" in 5/4.
In honor of the statue on the campus of Clark University.
A classic American song by a great American composer, in the style of America's greatest domestically-invented music genre.
The übercenter of Worcester is the corner of Central Street and Worcester Center Boulevard, where the DCU Center (formerly the Centrum) is located. Its song is a sort of third-wave ska thing.
A duet for piano and organ, and my second song done without percussion.
O Come O Come Emmanuel is one of my favorite hymns, for its cool medieval sound. I transcribed the melody out of the Lutheran Book of Worship, then harmonized it myself.
The name refers to Hadwen Arboretum, on Lovell St. in Worcester. I had the core of this one written for a long time before I figured out how to expand it into a full song.
The general concept for this song was based on Charles Mingus's "Haitian Fight Song." I wrote it in a flash of inspiration after my first time listening to Värttinä, a Finnish progressive folk band.
The name refers to the interstate highway that runs through Worcester.
"Mood" signifies that I was going for something in the style of "In The Mood." "Crab" refers to the structure -- at the level of sections and transition bits, this resembles a musical palindrome, referred to as a "crab canon" in Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach, which I had just read. "No" refers to the fact that "crabby mood" is not an accurate description of the feel of the song.
This song started out with the bassline. I quickly realized the other elements I was adding were fairly cliched, so I went for broke (adding stuff like the guiro) and admitted it in the title.
The title comes from the "use the first thing that pops into your head" school of thought. The song is a jazz sort of thing.
This song is named in honor of Worcester's Turtle Boy statue. I wrote it without a name, then decided that 1) it has a beach or ocean sort of feel, and the turtle is a sea animal, and 2) it's a fun song, and the boy looks like he's having altogether too much fun. This was my first piece completed after I figured out how to do percussion in NoteWorthy Composer (the drums in Fish March were originally done in Hammerhead and spliced in, but I went back and did them with midi later).
For my second attempt at creating a midi, I went with a march style. The name was grabbed from the topic of conversation in IRC at the time I completed it.
This is my first attempt to make a midi file. It's based on the only chord progression I really know (12-bar blues). I used NoteWorthy Composer to put this (and my other midis) together.
I got a huge pile of hits after Howard Dean's infamous Iowa speech looking for the remixes that were springing up (I'd had an earlier post about a remix of his "What I want to know" speech). So I thought I'd throw my hat into the ring. Rather than splice his actual scream into some other song, I thought I'd take some inspiration from the excellent Dictionaraoke and reconstruct the speech using sound files from Merriam-Webster Online.
Quasi-ska, at least. It sounds kind of dumb because my software can't handle the concept of 6/8 time, so I had to make do with dotted quarter-eighth combinations.
This was my impetus for starting to do sound editing. I found sound clips of Quechua words, including mana q'anra (clean) and q'ili q'anra (dirty). I wanted to make a song out of them, but they were encoded as RealPlayer files. So Amanda did the old tape recorder to the speakers trick to make .wav files that I could work with. I'm not entirely satisfied with it, although I kind of like the bass line (which was inspired by They Might Be Giants' "The Guitar").
This was one of my first experiments with CoolEdit2000, the trial version software I first used to make songs. I think the song is a good reflection of the Colgate men's hockey team's 2000-2001 season. I'm not sure how I managed to get it to say "bummer" so clearly on each note, because now all I can get is this croak sound when I try to set a clip to music.Back to
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