The closing track on Painting Music is Outro. So Outro is the outro. Sorry for that pun. Couldn’t resist. I was stuck for a name, much like Deadmau5 said he sometimes is, and then he resorts to calling his tracks things like Some Chords and Lack of a Better Name.
Outro is the track in which everything that I learned during the making of “Painting Music” comes together.
It started with me going back to the “This Exquisite Forest” platform, which is the web audio generation platform that had been the least satisfying to work with, because the resulting sounds are so saccharine. I set all the parameters down to the least melodious and most low-key – saddest tone, maximum synths, maximum ambience, etc. What came out was a sort of low drone with a barely audible melody.
What did this peculiar snippet sound like?
Yes, that is a lot of noise.
There is a melody in there though, if you use your imagination.
So I wrote a score based on what I heard in the clip. I was determined that this app, This Exquisite Forest, will not defeat my attempts to make a beautiful song out of it.
The final result, many weeks later, is a Rondo: six variations of the theme, with the bridge providing a break and contrast. As a result, the melody seems to go round and round, like it’s going away, but then it comes back again. The composition includes the oud, bouzouki and tanpura, but the defining instrument that I used in Logic, is the Eastern Storm Voice, a one-shot vox.
It is a fitting finale to the album, I think: that very human, expressive voice, which is the complementary opposite of the machine-generated sounds from which the songs on the album were created.