I haven’t updated my Bandcamp page in several years… But that’s just changed! I’ve uploaded music from the last year or so there. So now you can download it in super-high fidelity, store it on your hard drive, record it to tape for your Walkman sessions… The sky’s the limit!
Category: Ambient
Deep River dreaming
I’ve written a few times about heading down to Western Australia’s “Great Southern” region. There’s a small bush-shack we stay at. It’s on a property surrounded by national parks, and is far from the highway. It has such a beautiful diversity of ecosystems — coastal scrub, rainforest, majestic karri forests, peppermint tree groves… It’s an incredibly calming place.
The pieces in this album all capture something about that place. Most were written there, in fact! There’s something about being in nature that just gives me a chance to pause, and to actually process things. There’s more space, and there’s less pressure to run from doing this to doing that to doing something else.
I’d describe this album as “ambient”, but there are really multiple styles together. Several of the pieces combine sounds taken from the forests with acoustic and digital sounds. My hope is that these pieces will give you the chance to feel the chaos of life slow down, if only for a moment.
As always, you can listen wherever you stream your music.
Diffuse
After a long hiatus, another (short) track. This one came about as a result of playing with some of the presets in NI Rounds — and was greatly facilitated by today being a public holiday. 😛
Diffuse by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.If you’re interested in using any of my music in your games, videos, or other multimedia productions, let me know!
[Music] Evermore
This track is somewhat experimental in its textures and timbres: it combines instruments such as traditional Indian percussion with pipe organ and pitched-down, vibrato-ed cor anglais. For all that, it’s a simple, emotive track that (hopefully) doesn’t really try to do too much.
Evermore by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.If you’re interested in using any of my music in your games, videos, or other multimedia productions, let me know!
[Music] Autumn
This piece was a lot of fun to write. It’s in 7/8, with the bar broken into 2/3/2 rather than the more traditional 3/2/2. There’s a severely tortured Irish flute in the mix, sounding somewhat foghorn-like (from around 0’55), as well as washing machines being bashed and kitchen sink strainers being bowed. All this adds up to a very cinematic sound.
Autumn by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.If you’re interested in using any of my music in your games, videos, or other multimedia productions, let me know!
[Music] Daylight
For some reason, 7/8 has always appealed to me. This laid-back track layers 7/8 lines at normal- and half-speed to establish a “flow” — which is then disrupted at the end by offsetting some lines by a quaver or a crotchet.
Daylight by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.[Music] Tasman
This is a more laid-back track that mixes ambient synths with viola, violin, and flute. It’s in a similar vein to “Terminal” from a year or two ago, but somewhat simpler and lighter in its execution.
Tasman by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.[Music] Cascade
This track is actually from a couple of weeks ago. I just never got round to putting it up here. 🙂 It’s really a background track: something you listen to while you do something else. Part of the idea behind it was to make a melange of disparate “instruments”, and smoosh them together to make something that’s coherent. Let me know what you think!
[audio:http://www.barryvan.com.au/music/cascade.mp3]
(Download)
Cascade by Barry van Oudtshoorn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.Generative Music
Continuing my HTML5 and canvas experiments, I’ve put together a generative music system. Essentially, a series of particles move across a field, occasionally triggering sounds — the sound triggered depends on their location in the field.
There is, of course, a little bit more to it than that. Under the hood, I’ve got a series of HTML5 Audio objects that are used to provide polyphonic audio using a simple round-robin algorithm (I encoded the audio in OGG, so you’ll need to use an OGG-friendly browser, like Firefox). The particles are much simpler than those in my previous canvas dalliance, in that they don’t swarm, and their motion is more linear.
