About a year ago, I conceived a piece that would incorporate video and philosophy as well as music. I've spent a great deal of my life thinking about the nature of life and the realities of our existence and wanted to present some things in the form of the multimedia experience.
This was all done on a shoe string budget (the most expensive part was a few batteries for my audio recorder!). I incorporate lots of sounds from nature in the electronic aspect (the everyday sounds that we experience -- from the sound of water to the sound of construction, for instance). Many sounds were created in csound, a program taught in an excellent course in electronic music by my composition professor Dr. Tom Mckenney. The narration was done by Neil Minturn. The title Swan Song comes from the traditional usage: a song sung by a mute swan just before it dies. I most certainly plan on writing many more pieces obviously but I mean it mostly as some "important thing that I put all of myself into." In other words, a piece that has more than just notes, but what I believe in or feel strongly about; if I didn't do anything more with music, this is something that I would still want people to know.
I've never watched more than a minute of this thing since I made it; it's too difficult to get through. Back then it was often the case where I knew something was off but didn't know how to immediately fix it and so I just left it. Usually there was a deadline glooming, but using that as an excuse is the easy way out. I think an artist does whatever it takes to make something that they are proud of. I didn't have that standard back then, but I think I do now.
Back to Swan Song, for now I'm not going to include any source files. The files are huge and I really doing think it's valuable. The video of the performance itself exists under senior_recital.