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MP3 Files: Music by Nicholas HenderFrom this page, users can freely download and listen to full length and high fidelity examples of Terasonic's work. All the music featured here has been composed, recorded, and produced, by Nicholas Hender; to read a short biography, please visit the About page. Files downloaded from this site are not to be altered in any way, or used for any commercial purpose, without full permission from their creator (Nicholas Hender). To obtain permission, please visit the Contact page. Files downloaded from this site may be used for educational and artistic purposes where no commercial activity is involved, although full credit to Nicholas Hender must be explicated. More music by Nicholas Hender can be downloaded from terasonic.co.uk, the new Terasonic sister site. The music at terasonic.co.uk is the most recent. The below MP3 files have been arranged into 15 untitled "collections" (rather than "categories"). The pieces of music in each collection are of similar or related styles, although the overall style of any collection can be heard to vary greatly in comparison to most of the other collections. Simply scroll down this page, or follow the below links, to find each collection.
Go to MP3 Collection 1 MP3 Collection 1
In Training was originally created as the soundtrack for a short film, and has since been "touched up" to make it more interesting as a piece of music on its own. The sound textures are derived from an impressionistic interpretation of recordings made on location around railway lines. A Pink Floyd / Peter Gabriel inspiration, A Big Future in Small Goods was originally intended to accompany a slide show comprising pictures of internal organs. The heart beat that can be heard here is an actual recording of my own. Sonar is an exercise in using a stereo delay as an echo generator, for the purpose of rhythmic texture. It also represents an effort to fuse "ambient" and "trance" styles, and makes use of some basic sounds that I intend to use more in the future. MP3 Collection 2Obviously, there's only one file in this collection, but it's quite a long one (~11 minutes). This was created mainly in order to be accessible from most levels of musical appreciation, and for the purpose of demonstrating my skills as a synthesist. All sounds have been synthesised by me, Nicholas Hender; most of them from absolute scratch. MP3 Collection 3Bell Balls was created using the sound of two Chinese "health-giving" balls. A recording of each ball was looped, and then layered at different pitches. The pitch, and as a consequence the "jingling" rate, of each layer is dynamically controlled throughout the piece. This produces an assortment of varied rhythmic and harmonic textures, interspersed by smooth transition sections. All sound, and hence all music, is essentially constructed from sine tones, but Show Me a Sine is more obviously constructed from sine tones. I chose to use a simple timbre (an enveloped sine tone) for the sonification of the melody and harmony of Show Me a Sine because no component frequencies occur with the event of each note. This means that nearly any tuning structure can be utilised effectively, without any thought given to the relationship between a note's fundamental pitch and its component frequencies (as there are no component frequencies). Inevitably, the effect of complex tones occur within Show Me a Sine anyway, as the result of polyphony. The introductory section of Show me a Sine implements the expansion of the melody and harmony towards a 16 pitch equal division of 3 octaves. The middle section expands and contracts the tuning between 16 pitch divisions of 1, 5, and 7 octaves. The final section contains more complex harmonic polyphony, gliding transposition, and rhythmic interest achieved through constantly varying the tempo across subdivisions of the beat. Loch represents a movement in sonic experimentation as a means of exploring the specific areas of tuning and texture in music. This is done through the use of creative synthesis: a source signal, generated by frequency modulation, is passed through a bank of bandpass filters, the centre frequency of each oscillating at a sub-audio rate (<20Hz). The bandwidth of each filter is such that only one component frequency (or partial) of the original source signal can pass through, resulting in each bandpass filter gliding back and forth across groups of sequential pitches. This constitutes the audible deconstruction of a single complex tone. As the modulation ratio of the original source signal is a whole number at only the beginning and ending of the piece, every other section of the piece is inharmonic, with the groups of sequential pitches naturally changing their tuning to reflect this. Created from my synthesis of a Troubadour Harp, Harpestry 1 is a study of melodic and rhythmic development, from a somewhat minimalist approach. MP3 Collection 4Salvage 1 and Salvage 2 are demonstrations of how much can be done by editing. I made a multitrack recording of a band playing their best song, but the band broke up before the mixdown was complete. Not wanting to waste the session, I cut the tracks into riffs, the riffs into beats, and the beats into sub-divisions of beats, and then shuffled these sub-divisions around so as create new beats and riffs, from which I was able to assemble two new pieces of music; neither of which is recognisable as the song that was originally recorded. These Salvage pieces are intended to give the listener the impression that they are hearing a live band jamming in a rehearsal room. MP3 Collection 5Damo and Sexamajig are experimental synthetic pieces. They were created for the purpose of showing that electronic music can be expressive. They were also created for the sake of exploring alternative methods of composition, such as putting the creative emphasis on timbrel manipulation and rhythmic texture, rather than just melody and harmony. Rocket Launcher is designed to be performed on a Yamaha Diskclavier, which is a real piano that can be controlled by MIDI data streamed from a sequencing computer. Therefore, Rocket Launcher represents a means of realising electronically composed music on an acoustic instrument. Writing (and sequencing) music for the Yamaha Diskclavier allows the composer to creatively go far beyond the restrictive limitations of even the most virtuosic human performer. Rocket Launcher also represents a beginning of an exploration into this allowance. MP3 Collection 6
These are all atonal, 12-tone pieces for the piano. They utilise the extent of conventional 12-tone theory, and are also designed to push the limit of virtuosic playing ability. MP3 Collection 7The intention of these 5 pieces is merely to demonstrate my ability to compose and produce music in a range of popular and conventional styles. MP3 Collection 8Study Number 1, as referred to in my Honours Thesis of 1997 (zip, 1.07MB), is a demonstration of the audible differences between "harmonic" timbres, and various kinds of "non-harmonic" timbres. A recurring rhythm changes gradually from timbre to timbre as it plays, all the while remaining on the same pitch. The other studies, also referred to in my Honours Thesis (zip, 1.07MB), are demonstrations of the effect of gradually changing tuning systems to accommodate gradually changing timbres, in order to maintain consonance throughout. Rhythmically and melodically, they are all the same piece of music, differing in that: ~ in 2a, there is no change in tuning system as the timbre changes. MP3 Collection 9These are three more of my first efforts at realising my compositions through the use of a well featured electronic music studio. Russell Oxley, saxrox@hotmail.com, plays the tenor saxophone in Take the Plunge. MP3 Collection 10
Searching for an Answer was originally produced as my answering machine message. Pig Swill is improvised by a computer, under conditions specified through an object oriented programming language named Max. It is intended to sound like a free improvisation occurring between a bass guitar and a drum kit, in the location of a barn on a farm. Only the form of the piece has been completely predetermined. 8 seconds of DUH was originally produced as source material for demolition in the piece DUH (MP3 Collecion 12). MP3 Collection 11
These are two of my first efforts at realising my compositions through the use of a well featured electronic music studio. MP3 Collection 12Bacon Fumes was composed as an historic exercise, using traditional editing methods with 1/4 inch reel-to-reel tape machines. Although sounding equally as experimental, DUH was the first piece that I produced purely through the use of direct digital synthesis. MP3 Collection 13Physix was composed for the purpose of demonstrating a particular piece of MIDI sequencing software. 15 seconds of DUH is the piece that's dissected in DUH (MP3 Collection 12). Learning was produced purely as a method of learning to use new sequencing software. These pieces were only ever recorded to cassette, and are yet to be mastered. MP3 Collection 14
These pieces were created with only the on-board sequencer of a lone multi-timbrel keyboard synthesizer. They were only ever recorded to cassette, and are yet to be mastered. MP3 Collection 15
These are atonal and semi-tonal piano pieces composed during my first year of university. They were only ever recorded to cassette, and are yet to be mastered. © 2007, Nicholas Hender / Terasonic, ABN 55 077 342 706. |
