DAW PIECES
The acronym DAW stands for Digital Audio Workstation. Nowadays it might better be called a Digital Audio World, in that it encompasses all manner of audio elements.. It is where I spend most of my time composing. It allows me to generate music, sounds, live audio and even images into a single environment, weaving a tapestry of elements, affording me great flexibility. The samples that I use are almost entirely based on Spitfire Audio's BBC Symphony Orchestra as well as other sample libraries they produce. Used properly, these instruments are hard to distinguish from real ones.
Please note: All DAW pieces are mixed for headphones.
Concerto For Hyperorchestra
My first large work using the Digital Audio World, the Concerto for Hyperorchestra was composed in 2020 during COVID lockdown. Its four movements are described well by their titles.
Occluded Illuminations
These three pieces are part of an ongoing cycle. The first one, Normal, was composed in 2022. A film version is available below.
Normal concerns itself with the impact of global warming and our seeming indifference to its effects. Voyager imagines the Voyager spacecraft being found in a few billion years by an intelligent life form. Strawberry is about the inner workings of the mind of a man with dementia.
Pieces for Unprepared Pianist
Composed in 2019, these pieces were devised as a means of combining two bits of software, the Modartt’s PianoTeq 8 and the Ircam Prepared Piano.
Reflections on Mortality
As I become older, my thoughts turn naturally to my own mortality. These pieces were composed in 2019 as solace, I suppose. The poems for Petrichor and The Bell are by Seán Street; Transition and A Rich Life by me.