Brooks Frederickson
Digital Portfolio
Quilt - 2023
|
Roles:
- Composer - Recording Session Producer - Audio Editor / Mixer |
My mother, Karen Frederickson, is a fiber artist. She knits, sews, rug-hooks, and quilts. I grew up wearing hats and sweaters knitted by my mother, sleeping under quilts she made, and using potholders, hotpads and washcloths in my kitchen. Recently, as the art world re-thinks the distinction between Art and Craft, my admiration and understanding of my mom’s work has grown. I see her keen sense of color, the exquisite detail in her quilting, the focus needed to execute an intricate pattern.
The album Quilt follows the production of a quilt designed by myself and my mother. We adapted a pattern (NAME) that uses the rearrangement or striped fabrics to create squares overlapping in a 3D space. After designing the quilt and selecting the fabric, my mother began the long process of producing the quilt. I recorded the sounds of the process (ironing, cutting, sewing, and quilting) along with the sounds of us talking - about quilting, about the cat. Those recordings were cut into samples which I reimagined and turned into textures and instruments. After the quilt was finished, I began writing music for the piano and percussion quartet Yarn/Wire based off of the patterns found within the quilt. The arrangement of colors, the rhythm of the cuts were turned into fodder that generated gestures, sections, or harmonies. Over multiple recording sessions spaced out over multiple months, Yarn/Wire and I recorded those ideas, improvised over simple rules, and searched for ways to interpret rhythmic cycles. All of those recordings were edited, sampled and cataloged before being stretched, reversed, rearranged and resampled. The two sound worlds, the sounds from the sewing machine and the sounds from the Yarn/Wire recording sessions were collaged to create the album Quilt. Aside from a few simple synthesizer sounds, all of the sounds on the album originated either in my mom’s quilting studio or in the recording studio. Each track on the album contains sounds from both the quilting and Yarn/Wire, with the exception of track 5 - Mitered Corners, which is made exclusively from quilting sounds. The track's names come from quilting terms, and the cover art and artwork associated with the album come from the quilt at the center of the album. |
I was thinking about the buffalo - 2022
|
|
A commission for a string quartet coincided with a time when I was deeply interested in generative systems, expansive phrases with evolving harmonies, and the original series of Star Trek (the title "I was thinking about the buffalo" comes from the end of the first episode with Captain James T. Kirk).
The piece was commissioned and recorded by the Ciompi Quartet. I worked closely with the recording engineer to capture a close-mic'ed, intimate sound from the quartet, which I mixed with the pre-recorded electronic track. I made the track by stretching and effecting the resampled audio from the MIDI-based mockup of the piece. Other synthesizers and electronic percussion was added in to reinforce particularly poignant moments. For the video, I created an algorithm in the coding language Processing that took color values from a grid of pixels. Each RGB color value was then assigned to a pixel in a grid of boxes whose size and opacity were controlled by slightly-out-of-phase LFOs. Roles: - Composer / Generative system builder - Recording Session Producer - Audio Editor / Mixer - Video Editor - Generative visual algorithm designer |
Here to Hear // Hear to Here - 2020
|
Here to Hear // Hear to Here is an interactive audio-based installation that uses the participants' voices as triggers for generative musical events. Participants hear pitches in their headphones, if they match (or get with a generous tolerance range) the pitch with their voice, the system then recombines layers of audio (samples from a recording session with The Crossing, synth layers, digital percussion layers) into unique musical experiences. Six stations were set up in the installation and ran independently.
The installation started as an exercise in thinking how I could create an environment for non-musicians to be active participants in music making. Today's technological landscape allows for nearly anyone to be a music producer. Smartphone apps, web-based audio programs, and free and open-source softwares give easy access to digital music tools. In making installations, I look for ways to give participants a novel way to make music without needing any prior specialized musical training. Roles: - Composer - Recording session engineer - Max application designer - Audio editor / mixer - Installation designer |