As an enthusiastic synthesizer player in the mid 80s, I was fortunate to be able to build up a fully analogue music studio and used it to work on promotional video projects with a team of associates who specialised in building 3D computer models of architectural and civil engineering projects. The promotional videos needed sound tracks and as I was ‘the sound and video man’ I got the opportunity to create dozens of projects, helping to promote the design work of several important UK based architectural and engineering practices. It was a fun time.
Short deadlines and commercial pressures being what they were in those days (and still are) it became increasingly challenging to compose original music for these short duration promos. To meet the short turnarounds the studio eventually evolved into more of a production house using a wide range of commercial library music to layer in underscores to support the more important explanatory voice-overs. So it was, in the mid 90s after many happy years of operation, I closed the studio to concentrate fully on developing the related software company that was to take up all my time and energy until three years ago
sound therapy
Over the past few years I’ve had the pleasure of rebuilding my studios and concentrating my energies on photographic, video, drone and sound projects. As part of this I’ve also been working with Gabriela Bocanete on her Holistic Health Coaching, Yoga Nidra and Sound Therapy consultancy business, recording and editing her course videos and creating meditation pieces to support her online classes.
Through understanding more of Gabriela’s work in Health Coaching and Sound Therapy I’ve become very interested in the beneficial effects of sound and music based therapies, and also in how this ties in with Gong Bath based meditation therapies and the study of the Chakras in Yoga. In my current studios, standard synthesizers offer a ‘ready made’ palette of sounds that are often used to create Ambient tracks and meditation pieces but I found that these, even today, are still limited in their capacity to explore sound and music as a therapeutic tool.
I own several such hardware synthesizers from manufacturers such as MOOG, Sequential (Dave Smith), Elektron, Korg etc., and they are all inspiring instruments, each in their own way, but they do not allow you easily to build sound palettes ‘from the ground up’, from fundamental analogue oscillators, and then shape that sound in simple ways to compose pieces in support of relaxation and meditation sessions.
My initial Modular rack. The array of modules has since grown significantly but this was the set used for this video.
That ‘challenge’ has led me back to analogue synthesis and in particular to Eurorack based Modular Synthesis. Much has changed since my work with synths in the early to mid eighties, but there has been a strong revival of interest in those early synthesisers and a new bread of modular designs has evolved from the early machines.
a composition for meditation
This post isn’t the place to cover any level of detail about Modular Synthesis but I’ve recently worked on a video piece that has given me the chance to illustrate the sort of thing I’ve been doing to get to grips with it and apply what I’ve learned to real life meditation track work. Naturally I’ve wanted to create not only audio tracks but also combine them with occasional video work.
The piece below was composed as my first modular based relaxation and meditation track. I chose to apply it to a short version of a drone video, which I shot some years ago, that first introduces the modular rack I used and then goes on to show the Dengie Marshes at sunset on the east coast and in particular the ancient Saxon Chapel of St Peter on the Wall that survives there at Bradwell-on-Sea to this day. It’s a fascinating walk along the sea defences and today it’s become a bird sanctuary and so some parts of the coastline are now protected and inaccessible.
All the sounds created for the track are generated from first principles in one or other of the modules, then the sounds are ‘shaped’ in various ways using envelope generators and also modulated via low frequency oscillators and tonally shaped using various types of filters, then all the separate signals are finally mixed into an arrangement. Reverb is added at the end of the signal chain and the arrangement is passed through various processors into a digital audio workstation called Logic Pro X where it’s mastered and combined with video.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Playback via headphones or a high quality audio system are essential in getting the most from the work as the deep drones and bell like sound textures will not reproduce properly on Smartphones or iPads.