Using MuBu, I chopped up I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For into a dense collage of tiny fragments which I improvised with in Max/Spat/MuBu and then pieced together in Reaper.

I made this for the Chaire Supersonique project i did in collaboration with IRCAM and the Beaux-Arts de Paris.

Big nod to Negativland here!

Stolen Music was originally conceived for my final project as part of the IRCAM Cursus, but it is also an ongoing musical world-building project composed of websites, audio collages, acts of piracy etc.

The basic aim of the project is to explore two main ideas that matter to me:

Examining the boundaries of a "piece" of music: questioning the idea of the sole author and finding ways to subvert the linear, sectional timeline of a typical musical performance
Presenting an argument that all musical material should be fair game for all people to work with, regardless of who owns it under current copyright law.

This project owes a huge debt to Claudia Jane Scroccaro, the other teachers at IRCAM, and my colleagues from my course who let me mess with their music. Much more info is available on the dedicated website.

Inspired by an idea of Anaïs Fontanges, this is a web page that emulates ghost-hunting radio scanners as used by paranormal investigators. This idea sparked a period of fanatacism about radio and particularly about how the weird romance of the ephemerality radio somehow holds on even when you carry it into the digital domain (where the ephemerality is a little bit faked...)

It basically cycles randomly through a range of French and Irish web radio stations, with white noise faking a transition between stations! But sure the REAL ghost boxes are fakes too, aren't they....>>??????

Three radios are set up at the very beginning of the piece but playing only silence. Each is tuned to a different radio station. The radios are set up in a line with a space between them, with the viola player standing in the fourth position in the line.

The three radio stations correspond to the frequencies of three low-powered radio transmitters placed in the venue. Each is connected to a channel of the multi-channel playback device.

A microphone is unobtrusively placed in the space and begins recording when the viola player starts playing.

After a certain amount of time, the first radio starts playing back the recording.

After two more periods of time, the remaining radios also join in, so a canon accumulates.

So far, I've only performed this once and the performance officially "failed" - because I forgot to sit beside the microphone, meaning it only picked up a very, very quiet signal. Once I realised, I was forced to play very quietly to compete with it (which then made the later parts of the canon even more quiet), The YouTube clip here is from that performance - it was somehow a nice effect even though my idea didn't work at all

I think the piece has legs though!

Three radios are set up at the very beginning of the piece but playing only silence. Each is tuned to a different radio station. The radios are set up in a line with a space between them, with the viola player standing in the fourth position in the line.

The three radio stations correspond to the frequencies of three low-powered radio transmitters placed in the venue. Each is connected to a channel of the multi-channel playback device.

A microphone is unobtrusively placed in the space and begins recording when the viola player starts playing.

After a certain amount of time, the first radio starts playing back the recording.

After two more periods of time, the remaining radios also join in, so a canon accumulates.

So far, I've only performed this once and the performance officially "failed" - because I forgot to sit beside the microphone, meaning it only picked up a very, very quiet signal. Once I realised, I was forced to play very quietly to compete with it (which then made the later parts of the canon even more quiet), The YouTube clip here is from that performance - it was somehow a nice effect even though my idea didn't work at all

I think the piece has legs though!

Hawk Cliff (also known as the Vico Baths) is probably the most beautiful and peaceful place to swim in Dublin (unless the water is too rough or there are jellyfish around..). I was given an assignment to combine field recordings with home-made synthesiser sounds, and decided to use the sea as a soundtrack. I decided to use my music to complement the soundtrack, rather than the other way around, so my contribution is quite minimal! Thanks to Mark Horgan, for moral support and judicious help with choosing a spot to record from. (Boring technical programme note below)

Nestled beneath Vico Road, where the rich and famous of Dublin lock themselves away from the public, Hawk Cliff is a place of splendid isolation. Men go there, not only to bathe, but to lose themselves to solitude, lulled into meditation by the lapping of the ocean.
To accompany the sound of Hawk Cliff without interrupting its natural rhythm meant stripping back my approach to composition virtually to nothing. There are five different synthesisers, all very simple. Each has three oscillators phased and tuned differently and, at most, a comb filter or ring modulator to add interest to the sound. The pitches used by each synthesiser expand outwards in a kind of Christmas tree formation, with each moving by a different interval. Essentially, each synthesiser builds a chord of a specific stacked interval. They each add pitches at different rates, albeit all too slowly for a discernable beat to come through. Each synthesiser begins its chord from a different note, working by a descending circle of fourths (C,G,D,A,E...). An external ring modulator working equally on all five synthesisers is the only further processing.
By applying a somewhat serial approach to the composition, I reduce the impression my own musical personality leaves on the piece. I thought this was the right way to create a work about somewhere where people go to leave their individuality behind. Rather than becoming lost in thought, the patrons of Hawk Cliff become temporarily lost from thought, and simply exist.

made at the request of Dan Callanan for Department of Energy's Ambient Harvest (Landscape Mixtape). Track 25 on the mixtape

Made from Bill Whelan's soundtrack from Dancing at Lughnasa using MuBu for audio-descriptor-based concatenative audio synthesis.

Circum is an experiment in creating a silent, animated score: the visual element is supposed to be visible both to the performers and the audience and it acts as the entire "text" for the performers. For the musicians, the video inspires them to create sound, generating a feedback loop where their actions are affected both by the video and the sonic choices they have already made. For the audience, however, sound and sight unfold simultaneously. Circum is also my first attempt as an Irish artist to get into the world of James Joyce - probably the most important Irish artist? My transitions, which sit between pieces focused on specific episodes of Ulysses, transverse the entire text (backwards) in several ways, treating Bloomsday like Groundhog Day. The animated score is made of text transformed algorithmically into music notation, both displayed using particle systems