Why I made "Faucet"

---

last 50 seconds of Faucet

---

I 'composed' that 'piece', 'produced' that 'track', in Spring 2023 for a course. After having been through many composition and electronic music courses and having played the game long enough on other people's terms, I resolved to make something more personal. I began to realize that I enjoyed the abstract depth and architecture music can have through my composition courses, and that I loved, as I always have, electronic sounds if you processed them well enough. Conversely, I felt that both were missing the other- acoustic music just didn't sound as engaging on a timbral level, and a lot of electronic music I was listening to was too predictable in terms of several musical elements, but form and harmony in particular.

Context

Reconciling my two majors was my principal goal, and I must have used that word many times- I wanted to make sonically engaging (i.e. electronic music) that was a little fluid in a compositional sense. Additionally, all the classical music I was listening to did not connect with me on a personal level. I felt as though I was living through someone else's aesthetic fantasies, which is no doubt a valuable part of education, but the reason why I studied composition was so that I could express myself and not someone else. The time to (try to) let my music sound like me had finally come.

I heard a lot of EDM growing up, but stopped listening to it regularly by the time I was 16 or so, and had moved on to other genres, as one does. And yet my feelings for EDM kept lingering somewhere inside me, and I knew that despite the distance I had created between EDM and I, it had left a irreversible dent in my aesthetics anyway, and that my tenderness towards it would have never ceased completely. It was also unreasonable to pretend like I had completely parted ways with the genre; when you use DAWs, and produce in an electronic context like I had been for many courses, making beats is somewhat inevitable. A kick drum is a staple in a lot of electronic music- it's what horns are to jazz, what strings are to classical music. You can find exceptions to the rule, but it is hard to imagine that these staples could sound out of place in their respective genres. I decided at any rate to acknowledge my desire to make something that embraced what my 16 year old self enjoyed listening to.

There was something mildly controversial about the prospect of using EDM-ish sounds in my self-described mature compositional work. I can conjure a persona in my head of a "serious" composer saying, "Is EDM an "intelligent" kind of music? Are those sounds too commercial to be considered appropriate, and would the music be considered "cheap" by proxy? Are you sure you want to use beats? Is this deep enough?". Luckily, I never really felt perturbed by these hypothetical self-sabotaging questions- firstly, I was in a safe environment at my mosaic music school and with a professor who had my best interests in mind, and I had no other authority imposing their value judgements on me. Secondly, why would I reject my own history with the music I love?

I tried to affirm myself further by thinking of composers like Béla Bartók, who used their folk music in their more serious works. Folk music tends comes from a unacademic, non-scholarly kind of origin, and is representative of a collective mass, but it can connect deeply even with people who make music in academia. Having grown up as a citizen of the internet, I started believing that EDM was my folk music, that it was a part of my "heritage" (the word stuck with me because of that one José Mourinho rant I watched as a teenager) That is an intriguing cultural position but I won't elaborate for now. In any case, I was prepared to admit I wanted to acknowledge my EDM roots in my academic work and that I wasn't shy about it.

The music

The beats of Faucet represent my EDM heritage most clearly. A repetitive beat is what makes EDM so engrossing for most people, and probably the most key outward characteristic of the music. I have never danced to EDM- I am unfortunately allergic to that art form- but I always felt captivated by the sense of forward motion in the music, and made plenty of beats growing up too, wanting to capture the same sense of drive. But in Faucet, these beats are marked not so much by the typical 8 bar units of quarter note kick drum patterns but rather by a periodic interruption of said patterns through silence. That is the composer in me saying, "hmm, I don't want a loop which makes me unwilling to pay complete attention to the music for the next 16 measures". The term that a composition student would use is 'cadence'. The beats are being cadenced at unpredictable intervals. I took the main aspect of dance music, the beat, but I made it impossible to dance to by divorcing the kick drum from its typical function of marking the meter consistently, and instead had it act as a more neutral rhythmic event that was orchestrated more carefully. A lot of music analysis can be flowery, which I don't know how to respond to, but if I allowed myself to speak in that manner I would say that the beats in Faucet evoke some kind of reference to an evolutionary past- it represents a more evolved, futuristic species, with the 1-2-3-4 kick drum pattern being its evolutionary ancestor. Ha, very cringy of me to speak of my own music like this but izokay mannnn.

In terms of synthesis techniques, I remember making everything from scratch in soft-synths, particularly Absynth 5. I decided to add some randomness elements to the sounds so that they would sound a little different each time. Needless to say, I didn't compress things too much and sought a decent range of timbral and sonic variety in my piece, and set up several FX chains (I have improved my understanding of that process since then). Alongside that, I crafted several gestures through the use of some rather elaborate and tedious automation. Automation in itself is very interesting, and I wonder whether it is easier to be aware of how your piece can modulate over time in DAWs as opposed to staff notation because of the visual differences. It's also way easier to draw automation in Ableton Live than to make hairpins in Finale. That means that electronic music can potentially be more detailed in terms of musical instructions, and additionally there may be no possibility of you overwhelming the performer with excess instructions either, because in this case the computer performs everything.

Takemitsu et al.

That semester, I was enrolled in a class about the music of Toru Takemitsu. His orchestral works are really intensely detailed, and his sensitivity towards orchestration (and therefore sound design) eventually made left its mark on me. I had never heard the orchestra in such an organic and vivid manner till pieces like Archipelago S, Dream/Window, A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden, etc. It seemed Takemitsu conceived every single sound with a lot of thought and care, and admittedly a lot of music sounded very dull after I heard his own masterful works during those days. His music made me desire more subtlety and 'organic-ness' in my electronic music. On one hand, I think there is something very cool about ultra compressed electronic/pop music. That's what I heard growing up, and it remains a unique sound profile that evokes an unmistakable 21st century ethos. But on the other, I had finally eScAPEd the maTrIX and decided I wanted substantial dynamic variations and an overall sensitivity in my electronic music, which is why I decided against making things too loud. The long pad sounds in the latter half of Faucet were probably inspired by Takemitsu's string writing.

Other classical music had opened my ears as well. Early that semester I was fortunate enough to have a reading of my percussion piece, Tribulations, which was performed by a professional group, Iktus Percussion. The experience was great and the performers were supportive, but I felt repulsed by my composition, because I only wrote it for some kind of professional development- I didn't believe in the music. In any case, I remember having heard a lot of percussion music leading up to that session, like Ionisation by Varèse, Rain Tree by our friend Takemitsu, and Cage's First Construction (in Metal). All of these works alongside others exposed me to the idea that music didn't always need melody and harmony to be interesting, and could conceive of abstract rhythms and timbres as my main ingredients for music-making. You can make the case that a lot of Faucet comprises of said abstract rhythms and timbres, and does not show much concern for tried and tested melody/chord textures.

It would be a missed opportunity to not recount this anecdote and I might as well dump this memory here before I lose it: a year after all of this, I was walking in the Back Bay Fens and suddenly had an urge to listen to the EDM I used to enjoy growing up. At some point I heard Nicky Romero's Toulouse, and the educated Bachelor-of-Music-bound Amogh thought to himself, "wow, this utterly commercial music is seriously abstract. What an interesting contemporary bourgeois musical phenomenon!". I had somehow forgotten that I had been hearing abstract sounds growing up anyway, and realized that contemporary classical composers were not the first ones responsible for making me attuned to weird sounds. Another track by Noisia comes to mind in particular. Anyways, you can hear these kinds of rhythms and timbres in Faucet, but now they were now additionally informed by my exposure to contemporary classical music (and even my piano chops- there is a rather lazy blues line in the piece).

Peer Review

When I played the piece for people I got positive feedback from everyone (as was too often the case at Berklee, but that's a different story). A peer of mine who produced house music said he was really impressed with the sound design, and felt like all the sounds were crafted very carefully. That was an amazing piece of affirmation because that meant the piece would have also been accessible to my EDM-savvy self from the past. Another peer said he hadn't heard anything like it before. That affirmed my sense of individuality. When I played it for a distinguished electroacoustic/acousmatic composer in a masterclass, she eventually said, 'keep doing what you are doing'.

That moment was interesting for a few reasons. I remember discussing my attitude towards academic electroacoustic composers with a composition faculty member. Somewhat naively and regrettably disparagingly, I suggested that they were slightly cultish in their attitude towards sounds, like they were just closing their eyes, listening to pieces of paper rubbing against each other through reverb. I did recognize that I learnt a lot about sound and imagination listening to and making that kind of music, but there was this EDM boy in me who yearned for synthesized sounds, for dirty bass and fat supersaws, and so I always knew which camp I had pledged my allegiance to. That masterclass was great, because said distinguished electroacoustic composer seemed to have a lot to say about my work, which was validating, because that meant Faucet was dense enough for musical commentary. It was also heartwarming to get her support because it meant I could be accepted in academia and that we could all be friends despite aesthetic differences.

I was proud of that piece for sure. I had finally done something personally motivated in my work, and was making the music I had wanted to go to music school for- thoughtfully composed electronic music. Getting assignments done was cool, but Faucet was a turning point of sorts, and it felt like I was going to school to realize my own personal vision for music, and not someone else's. As one of my commercially-oriented professors (who was thoroughly supportive of my own voice) told me in reaction to Faucet, this kind of music would never top the charts, but affirmed that there could be a niche audience for it. I knew that I was the primary audience for this piece of music, like most of my other music. And as an audience member, I was left quite satisfied.