Ottski – Composing for Spaces and Places

Composition Work

Extractor Fan Improv:
I had tried and recorded in a few locations around my flat to find somewhere with ample noise to write with. I really liked having the window open in the living room and playing alongside the sounds of the city (as I live quite central), however I was struggling to come up with a musical base to improvise or compose around. When I was cooking a few days later, I realised the extractor fan in the kitchen had a very prominent note in the upper frequency and I decided to try again with that in mind.

As I was just in the kitchen, there was no real theme or story to tell through the music, so I ultimately decided to settle on improvising a piece that uses the extractor fan as a core droning instrument.

It’s definitely not my best work but I quite like how I played around with the vocal accompaniment and used a dust pan and brush as percussion (you can hear me get the idea and pick it up). Overall, not a bad try.

Graphic Score:
I decided to do the city scape, what I wanted to improv around for the last pice. I sat and listened for a while before deciding to just get on and draw the lines as I heard people talking, driving and birds singing. I used line thickness to note volume, while the pitch portrays sound density and pitch (obviously lol).

I took some creative liberties while coding the music into a MIDI channel and added more bird calls around the more faithful adaptation of my graphic score.