Electric LaTex | Concert 3

PROGRAM NOTES & COMPOSER BIOS
Ethereal
“Ethereal” is a three-part musical and theatrical piece encapsulating the relationship between a composer and an unfinished piece of music, blending string music and technology. “Beckoning” has the quartet play certain notes at random increments, with delay and a distorted and glitchy video filter to represent the unfinished piece without a composer: aimless, confused. In “Amor Est Que Ignoscit,” a Cmaj7 “mega-chord” is created by looping the quartet in three layers, representing how a piece can reach its full potential when it is completed. “Ethereal”, through its aesthetics and use of technology, sheds light on the idea that songs and musical pieces have lifetimes, and it is up to musicians and composers to bring pieces to life. Ethereal reflects on the idea that it is up to musicians and composers to bring pieces to life.

Evan De Anda is a musician, composer, and songwriter from Houston, Texas, majoring in General Engineering and minoring in Music Technology at Texas A&M University. With a focus on constant reinvention and synthesizing contemporary musical genres, Evan has been writing and releasing music since 2019. Evan is also an active member of the Century Singers choral group at Texas A&M as a Tenor 1.

Rainstorm
This piece was created using Plug Data for Music & DSP. I made the main beat using a sampler with raindrop samples as well as a background thunderstorm. When the thunder hits, the bpm speeds up and slows as the storm becomes calmer. I was also going for an ambient vibe. I hope you enjoy!

Katie Spartz is a senior at Tulane University from Houston, Texas. She is studying Music and minoring in Music Science and Technology with an interest in vocal performance. Outside of MST, she does musical theatre and acapella.

repulsion
burst // no, but…

Octothorpe is an emerging live electronics duo based out of North Texas with a focus in experimental music in intermedia. Its members consist of Nolen Liu and Joshua “JD” Fuller, who are both currently pursuing undergraduate degrees at the University of North Texas with focuses in electronic music performance and composition.

Come into Place
This piece was inspired by my trying to be a perfectionist in multiple projects which would all lead to the same result; an unfinished project wanting to start over. This piece contains some granular synthesis, sampling, and automation over time throughout the piece.

Javier Munoz II is a composer at UTRGV. Born in San Juan Texas, he started his music journey in the 6th grade where he learned saxophone. After high school, it wasn’t until 2020 that he wanted to start producing music. He composes all forms of music including trap, experimental, EDM, and popular music. His goal is to one day complete a full album where he composes, produces, mixes, and writes everything.

Protector of a Soul
This piece is about calming yourself when handling tough situations in life. Multiple layers combine and collide representing the bad thoughts in your head, but it’s who you are as a person. This piece uses the “plonky” script for the Monome Norns created by Zach Scholl.

Jazmin Juarez is a Music Technology major studying at the University of texas Rio Grande Valley. Jazmin plays the bass clarinet, enjoys composing for acoustic and electronic instruments and plans to compose for the UTRGV wind symphonic band in the future. She has her own music posted on YouTube on her account called Violet November.

Flow Through the Arches of Light
“Flow Through the Arches of Light” was the only piece of media lost when a hard drive of mine was corrupted. I value this track for its unnatural nature.

David Neuhalfen is a Nuclear Engineering Major at Texas A&M University from Louisville, Kentucky, with interests in audio engineering, music production, and songwriting.

from:/to: home
from:/to: home portrays the sense of nostalgia and adolescence, time of transition between childhood and adulthood. To visualize the dreamlike and playful quality of pure childhood, colorful and childlike imagery with vibrant colors were used, along with bell-like sounds tinkling on top of a harmonious musical texture. These images were shown in different perspectives at various speeds to mimic how children learn through everyday experience, highlighting the magical feeling of imagination and curiosity. Simple and recognizable forms were incorporated to reflect an image of a child chasing joy. The second part shows the idea of navigating and coping at unexpected times. Everything in this transitional stage gradually becomes complex to refer to how we meet new people and old relationships fade out. To accentuate emotional and physical stages of moving and living in another place, shattered and glitched images were repeatedly incorporated with an unsettling musical texture constructed by highly distorted and granularized sounds. The last part depicts a drowning of deep thoughts and memories. The pacing of blinking and blowing underwater bubbles, accompanied by a hopeless underwater soundscape, contextualizes and situates the viewer in the spatial location the video is referring to. The viewer is now at the bottom of somewhere dark and unidentifiable looking upward. Different values of blue were used to indirectly imply multiple layers in the mind just like the deep sea. Slowly descending into the unknown, one rekindles old relationships through flashbacks.

at night
In this piece, a detuned piano provides dark, eerie sounds. Besides strategic mic placement, reverb and delay allowed me to create a space for that feeling, along with stretching and reversing sounds and altering the pitch, creating a glitched aspect to the acoustic elements. I added synth ambience and a drum groove to accent the piano and the sounds some grit with audio processing. The visual accompaniment presents a night drive through a forest, because that is where I was taken, emotionally, when creating this work.

Ethan Cheney is a Music Technology minor at Texas A&M University.

Primor D’aion

Ickgo
This piece explores audioreactive visuals. I use Max to generate colorful scenes and send audio to it from Ableton. Along with sound, Ableton sends OSC messages that get values from envelope followers and parameter levels.

Nicholas Gomez is a senior in college obtaining a degree in music technology at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He grew up in San Benito Texas where he first began learning percussion. He continued his music education into college, first studying music performance then music technology. He spends his free time directing an indoor percussion ensemble that competes in local and national circuits. He plans on graduating in 2025 and to be an electronic music composer.

Persopolis
Dylan Sweidan program note: This ambient piece was inspired by works done by Aphex Twin and Radiohead, specifically their album Amensiac. This piece was made in a custom PD patch which includes two drum samplers, a vocal sampler, an arpegiattor, two FM synthesizers and one sawtooth wavetable.