This one goes out to all you musicians out there! Now lets start off with a question…
Q: “What does a musician using a tree as an instrument have to do with CGI?”
Read on to find out, and get ready to have Diego Stocco blow your mind!
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LINK: Absolutely Amazing Music Made from a Tree!
In the garden of my house there’s a tree with lots of randomly grown twigs. It looks odd and nice at the same time. One day I asked myself if I could create a piece of music with it.
To tune the tree I picked a fundamental note and tuned the twigs by trimming them with a pencil sharpener. I used two Røde NT6 and a NTG-2 as microphones, combined with a customized stethoscope.
I recorded the tracks live on a Pro Tools LE system. I didn’t use any synthesizer or sampler to create or modify the sounds. All the sounds come from playing the tree, by bowing the twigs, shaking the leaves, playing rhythms on the cortex and so on.
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The strange and unorthodox seem to be this musicians weapon of choice, as he has also made music using a bunch of other weird stuff like Typewriters, Sand, and Saws, to name a few.
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Typosonic Machine:
LINK: Typosonic Machine
Click the link to hear the Typosonic Machine in action.
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Music from Sand:
LINK: Music from Sand
I had some sandbags in the backyard that I used in November during a rainy day. I was moving them to a different spot when I heard the noise of the sand. I thought that maybe I could try a new sound design technique so I bought some piezo film transducers and started to experiment with them.
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Now this is of course not a music blog. So we started off with the question of “What does a musician using a tree as an instrument have to do with CGI?”
Well if you’re like me and always skipped to the end of those old “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, then probably already saw the answer in the Topics section of this post! But if not…Diego Stocco is also the composer for the new Nintendo Wii game, “The Conduit”. And he brought along all of his weird and wonderful instruments for the scoring of the soundtrack. Check out this behind the scenes video below!
LINK: The Making of “The Conduit Shaping” Soundtrack
For this project I created a large amount of ambiences, tonal distortions, massive drums and percussions by using various unusual acoustic and electronic instruments. In some cases, also for the orchestral sounds I experimented with signal processing to alter their original color and character.
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Kinda makes you want to pick up the game doesn’t it? Or at least the soundtrack.
LINK: Amazon.com – The Conduit – Nintendo Wii
In The Conduit, you’ll find yourself at the center of a thrilling battle involving aliens, secret agents and centuries-old government conspiracies, all set against the backdrop of modern-day Washington, D.C. Built from the ground up for the Wii, the game pits you against ruthless, wily enemies who react to your moves and use the environment to their own advantage. Tailor the game to suit your personal style, and see the game’s intense visuals burst to life complete with dynamic environment mapping, interactive water with real-time reflection and four-stage texture composition. Gather up to 11 additional players online for brutal multiplayer action, and incorporate the Wii Speak peripheral to enhance the immediacy of the battle.
