Studio Recording Mixdowns

Above are the waveforms for each studio session. All recordings were done in Pro Tools HD at the Elder Conservatorium's Electronic Music Unit and mixed-down in Adobe Audition.

I've included these images because they give an instant insight into of the performers' responses to the idea of improvising with "breathing space" between musical gestures...

Some could clearly flow out of the silence into a gesture, then roll off into silence again...

Some climbed onto an idea, rode it for a while, then climbed off, stopped, and climbed onto the next one...

Some transformed a continuous stream of sound-world...

...and some of the performers moved between all these ways of playing.


Audio Processing

Initially Audition was used for the mixdowns simply because I didn't have Pro Tools on my laptop, but I also found that it provided a much smoother workflow for managing the intricacies of waveform editing. There was a long process of editing out extraneous sounds in the circuit recording and mic clipping in the electric guitar recording. This was done quickly and roughly (as the second phase of sample editing will be intricate and precise), but Audition seamed the sounds together with exceptional ease.

Both the circuit and piano recordings were processed with Audition's Noise Reduction. As discussed below, this resulted in audible frequency erosions in the circuit recording, but seems to have cleaned up a hum in the piano recording incredibly well, with no audible degradation.

The waveforms were normalized, but no effects processing will be done until the next phase where they are edited into sample fragments ready for performance.