Song titles. Every song’s got one. For the most part, their relevance is obvious - “Yellow Submarine”, “Hey Jude”, “Michelle” - all great songs by the Beatles, all with really obvious titles. But what about instrumental music? Let’s look at classical, you’ve got “Fugue in G minor”, “Invention no. 1 in C Major”, “Minuet in G”, and while i really love Bach, he seems for the most part to view naming works as less of an artistic endeavor in itself, but rather a simple way of documenting things for better organization. Some musicians will give their instrumental songs names that reflect the mood or tone of the piece. In this post I’d like to explain how I came to name one of our songs, and explain the creative process that lead to it’s creation and ultimately facilitated it’s naming. The song in question is entitled “Prisoners” and it’s featured in the Style Portfolio.

The song came about as a result of my research into the different melodies and song structures found in “chain gang” music that was recorded by John Lomax in the 1930’s. The main inspiration for the song and the foundation upon which all the other musical elements are built is the ambient feedback that is first heard. This bit of audio is the result of the direct manipulation through the use of various audio effects and other audio manipulation techniques. After twisting and squeezing and utterly destroying a clip of the chain gang song into something crazy and beautiful, I was inspired to add all the rest of the musical elements. Once it was complete, the title was obvious: “Music of Prisoners” - it also helped that the song itself had a dark and dirty feel to it.

Below are clips that show the sound file in it’s various stages of “manipulation” and also the full length song that this experimentation led to.

Here’s the loop that I took of chain gang song.
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Here’s that exact same loop with a first pass of processing.
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Here it is again once the secret sauce is added.
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Just a little fine tuning and voila…
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

That was the inspiration for the song and the title: Music of Prisoners.
[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

Cheers,
Mitch