In our first project, we discussed thinking of ‘minimalism’ - or any musical style - as a ‘toolkit’ - a set of techniques and operations that can help you transform your material from a single idea - a melody, a rhythm, a texture, a formal concept - into a larger piece of music. The same is true with this new project, only now the ‘material’ you’re working with is sound itself.

So first: any and all techniques we studied in those first two units are applicable here as well. Sometimes even more so, because sound files are much more easily transformed than notation. One obvious example of this is the early music of Steve Reich, whose pieces we’ve used as examples in both units. Clapping Music and Come Out are both single-mindedly about phasing - the difference being that Come Out can phase in a much more gradual manner, because Reich isn’t limited to what he believes human performers are capable of.

So I strongly advise you to review the Minimalist Toolkit page from that first project, and think about how those techniques can be applicable to your sounds. Some of these - looping, drones, and canons - will be very apparent immediately , mainly because so many of these composers were making ‘tape pieces’ as well as composing for people. Other might require a little thought and ingenuity. As an example, think about melodic variation: what can you do with a melody? Invert it, play it backwards, transpose it, make it slower, make it faster, divide it up into smaller units, re-combine it, harmonize it. You can do all of these with your sound files as well, again with even more flexibility than when restricted to notes in a scale or rhythms that are comprehensible. The same is true of rhythm variation as well.Formally and conceptually, each of the six pieces on the listening provides possible models for how to organize your sounds into a meaningful larger structure. Schaeffer’s Etude and Cage’s Waterwalk use varieties of sounds that have something in common - respectively, sounds made by trains and sounds made by water. On the other side of the spectrum, LeCaine’s Dripsody and Reich’s Come Out focus obsessively on one single sound - though what they each do with that sound is very different. Czukay & the Beatles both create ‘imaginary landscapes’ by decontextualizing familiar sounds and juxtaposing them with one another. As you listen to more examples on the Musique Concrète playlist, try to think about how these composers and sound artists regard their materials, and what they do with them.

Here are two more articles about the history of early musique concrète which you might find helpful:

PIERRE SCHAEFFER: THE GODFATHER OF SAMPLING (article or website)

GUIDE TO TAPE MUSIC: 1944-1970 (article or website)

About your sound files and DAWs: as you know we’re using so many different DAWs on this project - they all do more or less the same things, but they go about it in different ways and, annoyingly, use different terminology for what seem to be the same things. Most DAWS use non-destructive editing, which means that what you’re seeing in the edit window (Clips in Pro Tools and Ableton are Regions in Logic, etc.) is just a data marker to the portion of the complete sound file. As you edit, that original sound file remains unchanged, and new ‘Clips/Regions’ are created. The original file never gets changed, hence ‘non-destructive.’ Audacity uses a combination of non-destructive and destructive editing, so if you’re working in that platform be sure you have back-up copies of your original sound files.