Earlier this month, I wrapped up my residency at Lobe Studio, where I spent a total of 80 hours across June and July. I went into the residency knowing a bit about 4DSOUND, the holographic sound technology that Lobe is dedicated to, having attended an info session and a performance there previously. But the experience of working independently in the space for so long was irreplaceable in terms of tuning my perception and thinking about spatial sound.
Something I’ve been thinking about lately is how my approach to performance has evolved. I’m a self-taught musician. Although I was in the school orchestra for a few years and have taken classes here and there as an adult to brush up on specific skills, I didn’t have a formal or professional training in music.
“Vision and vibe” are obviously foundational, but I struggled to think in those terms sometimes when I was writing music in the past. I found the writing process itself to be so challenging that I often couldn’t really spread my creative wings and consider the overall concept, or feel a sense of competence when it came to fine-tuning certain elements.
Last night I had an epiphany that was a surprisingly long time coming. I'd been going through the previously-mentioned process of tracking demos, and the way I was doing it was sending each instrument straight into the computer, to get a totally dry recording of each that I planned to later mix and layer with effects and so forth. And it sounded, if not awful, just wrong.
