Part 2

Paul Simon said “the way that I listen to my own records is not for the chords or the lyrics - my first impression is of the overall sound.” What's your own take on that and how would you define your personal sound?

I feel like I know what he means by that.
I think he’s a good early example of someone who was creating music alongside learning the techniques to create the recordings of it - the composition process becoming inextricably linked to the production process.

In the last few decades this has become increasingly possible, sophisticated and accessible. I also believe that in an era of people listening predominantly to recorded sound, from a wide variety of genres and sources, they have developed a greater appreciation of things like timbre and frequency range - we might listen to a track for its distorted punchy bass, not just its melodies.

Whilst I’d like to think that I am also generally trying to conjure a big soundworld of some kind, I don’t really think it’s up to me to define my personal sound - I just try to make something I like, and I’m ok with other people defining, categorising or interpreting it in any way they wish - after all, I have no control over that. I am always just happy and honoured that they have listened.

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds? In how far would you describe them as “musical”?

I feel like any sound has some potential to have some kind of musical quality. For example, I once made a whole EP just using sounds recorded in a week on the southern-most tip of the UK, including animals and waves but also a lot of man-made sounds which weren’t intended to be musical, the inadvertent by-products of other human activity, from electronic radio equipment to engines, lathes, lighthouses, voices, alarms, machines, all kinds of things. Every sound has either pitch, rhythm or timbre, and these are the building blocks of music.

Perhaps the most ‘moving’ experiences I’ve had are walking around in cities or the countryside late at night, especially in wild or exotic places I’ve never been to before, such as remote Scottish islands or the streets of Mumbai.
I’ve had many memorable and atmospheric experiences when exploring places I know really well but in the dead of night - such as the village and woods where I grew up, with the streets and shops all empty and silent, and the nocturnal animals out in place of the birds and people.

From symphonies and traditional verse/chorus-songs to linear techno tracks and free jazz, there are myriad ways to structure a piece of music. Which approaches work best for you – and why?

I like to try a lot of different approaches. I have enjoyed creating Classical music with the structures of dance music, with intros, builds, breakdowns and drops, and I’ve enjoyed making electronic music with symphonic forms or verse-chorus structures. In recent years, I have enjoyed structuring music in more adaptive and generative ways, allowing external influences or even listeners themselves to control the structure of tracks. I mostly do this using game audio software to create generative music textures, and I often find that the arrangements created by my randomised programming are better and more interesting than the ones I create more deliberately.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of one of your pieces, live performances or albums that's particularly dear to you, please?

Currently, I am especially fond of my ‘Sonic Woodland: Glade’ installation. This is a living piece of music which is performed by 5 speakers hung in trees. It is based around the simple Classical technique of the canon, but it is controlled by carefully-programmed software in real time. In essence, it is a cello canon, a single 2-minute-long slowly rising cello line which layers up to create harmonies. Every 40 seconds, one of six variations is chosen using conditional logic and randomisation - the same melodic line but played in three different octaves; an ornamented version; a slightly displaced version which creates more suspensions and dissonances; or just silence.

This piece was originally created for a level in a video game soundtrack, and so it is designed to last for however long is required (and can play infinitely). In the outdoor woodland installation, I am using it to reflect some of the non-human timescales of the interactions that are constantly unfolding between trees and plants in a forest - namely the exchange of minerals, water and nutrients via the underground mushroom network which connects them by their roots (mycorrhizal symbiosis). The result is a rich and swirling yet delicate and poised texture of layers of Classical cello harmonies, which plays for weeks or months with a very low chance of ever directly repeating itself. For example, the probability that all five cellos/trees will go silent at the same time is on average once every 32 hours, for thirty seconds.

In addition to this, much shorter sounds can be triggered sporadically at random every 10-20 seconds, which bounce from tree to tree much more rapidly, representing other woodland interactions such as the exchange of Volatile Organic Compounds. These sounds include piano riffs, synth arpeggios, woodpeckers tapping out morse code signals, percussive elements such as shakers and drum patterns, recordings of hunters calling signals to each other through the forest.

And all of this unfolds in outdoor settings where the natural environment plays an important integral part of the overall soundscape - the biophonic and geophonic sounds of the birds, the wind in the trees, rain, and so on.

Sometimes, science and art converge in unexpected ways. Do you conduct “experiments” or make use of scientific insights when you're making music?

Sure - the piece I just described, for example, was deeply informed by discussions with botanical scientists at the world-famous Kew Gardens, who originally commissioned the work to be performed in their botanical forest at Wakehurst in Sussex, UK (also home to the Millenium Seed Bank).

How does the way you make music reflect the way you live your life? Can we learn lessons about life by understanding music on a deeper level?

I guess I’m fairly obsessed with slow and detailed processes, and I take the same approach when I’m cooking. It’s possible that there are more profound insights to be had about the interconnectedness of things and the rules of the universe which can be gleaned from insights into music - Pythagoras’ Music of the Spheres theory, for example.

I’m also interested in the ways that the body responds to sound and music - the relationship between bpm and heart rate for example.
I’ve been lucky to work with some doctors and neuroscientists on creating soundscapes for use in the medical world, which gave many fascinating insights into the way the brain responds to sound, especially in unconscious states.

Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make a great cup of coffee. I’ve now found a process and technique that results in a coffee that I am very happy with every time, and I have settled on that one version of it.
This familiarity and repetition brings me great comfort and satisfaction.
However, I could not just listen to the same piece of music all the time, or repeatedly use the same processes to create the same piece of music every single time.
So I suppose the answer is ‘variety’.

Every time I listen to "Albedo 0.39" by Vangelis, I choke up. But the lyrics are made up of nothing but numbers and values. Do you, too, have a song or piece of music that affects you in a way that you can't explain?

I’m afraid I can’t think of a specific example, there are probably many but nothing jumps to mind.

If you could make a wish for the future – what are developments in music you would like to see and hear?

At the moment, I am especially interested in the potential for applying adaptive/generative/dynamic music to all kinds of artistic and commercial scenarios.