Paul D. Miller comments that: “You can think of sampling as a story you are telling yourself – one made of the world as you hear it, and the theatre of sounds that you invoke with those fragments is all one story made of many” (Miller 2008, p 12). Sampling sounds and creating new sounds creates the sonic elements of the work, the artist then assembles the pieces of the audible puzzle.
Constructing sounds from multiple sources is at the core of Space and Light. My focus on the computer as an instrument shifted towards the fundamental element of what an instrument can input/output. The answer to my question ‘What constitutes an instrument’ is as follows: An instrument is any medium through which sounds can be produced. The computer, put simply, becomes a tool that can encompass multiple sounds from multiple sources. The experimentation of sound as the source material for music is the first step. The next step is to begin sifting through the successful elements and commence the process of song construction.
Shifting and rearranging of fragments can lead to chance discoveries. Musicians such as Cage intentionally incorporated chance within their compositions (Pritchett 1993, pp. 1-2). In my case, an initial interest in chance was triggered by an accident. This initial loop (audio media 1) became more engaging after a duplication misalignment caused by a chance slip of the mouse. Adding reverb helped the misaligned loops flow together (audio media 2). Then with the addition of layering chords and other samples lifted the piece further (audio media 3). This ‘happy-accident’ revealed a much larger world for compositional procedures. Chance became an integral element of my album production and will be explored further in the following section of this paper.
