Fun with Metronomes!

I really like the kind of music that evokes ticking clocks — especially ones that aren’t working properly, or multiple ticks out of sync, etc. Some composers I know of who do this sort of thing are György Ligeti (I’m thinking of his second string quartet) and Harrison Birtwhistle.

At one point when I was recording from my digital piano into ProTools, I discovered that the audio connection picked up the piano’s metronome sound along with the, well, piano sound. I was annoyed about that at the time (until I figured out how to create a click track in ProTools 🙂 ), but today I decided to use it as an Integral Part of the Compositional Process.

I like juxtaposing strictly rhythmic material with more freeflowing ideas. The results are interestingly off-kilter sounding. I also looped the sound of the piano decaying to make a slightly spooky background sound.

Click play to listen:

Thanks for listening!