An online buddy of mine, the hilarious and award-winning blogger known as Bill in Portland Maine, listened to the piece for Day 6, and commented that it reminded him of the score for the film JFK. Taking a cue from the suspense movie reference, I’ve given that piece the title Mission: Asynchronous. Ah, music theory humor, I crack myself up, ho ho ho…

Anyway, when I was working on that piece, I really enjoyed playing around with the sound of the piano sustaining and decaying after playing a long series of notes up and down the keyboard. I made a note to myself to work with that some more. Today was the day!

As the piano sound decays it decreases in volume precipitously (hence the term… although the connotation of going rotten is interesting to contemplate too! 😛 ), which makes it challenging to create a continuous sound of any length with it. If you just loop it, you get a “bump” in the sound every time it starts over. So there was a lot of of overlapping and fading in and out involved in today’s piece. I think the cut-and-splice method of composing must be very similar to doing animation — it’s painstaking and time-intensive, and the results are usually pretty funny. Well, okay, that last thing maybe only applies to me. You can decide for yourself. 😀

I added some little melodic snippets, too, because I’m a hopeless romantic… 😉 If they sound familiar, it’s because they come from the end of Day 10’s piece. I’m nothing if not thrifty!

I think the piano decay sound is very ethereal and otherworldly. McDoc said it reminded him of the organ, particularly a French organ. In other words, we agree! 😉

McDoc thought the ProTools screen looked really cool, and asked me to post a screen shot of it. It is kinda neat-looking:

One last note: I think this piece is most effective when heard through a good pair of headphones. Unless you have awesome external speakers hooked up to your computer. I don’t. But my birthday is coming up — hint, hint! 🙂

Click play to listen:

[audio:http://missmusicnerd.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/audio/SustainDecay.mp3|titles=Sustain/Decay]

Thanks for listening!