Sound Collage

Royce Carlson

Now I am embarking on an artistic adventure further into the dimension of time by creating what I call sound collages. This is more commonly known as music, although some of my pieces are not much like the music you hear on the radio or in concerts. I have had an interest in music for long time. I began guitar lessons when I was eight years old, took music theory classes in college in the early 1970's, and was in a rock band during my college years. At one point in the late '70's I bought a synthesizer (Sequential Circuits' Prophet 5) and was going to buy a drum synthesizer and some recording equipment for the purpose of trying to get the sounds in my head out into the real world. At that time, it probably would have cost me upwards of $20,000 to get the equipment I needed to do what I wanted to do. That was too expensive for my meager budget so I sold the synthesizer and gave up on the idea. That was the pre-digital, pre-PC age.

Today, every PC comes with its own built in synthesizer and sound cards. What once required thousands of dollars worth of mixing boards and instruments now can be done with software for a few hundred dollars. So I am back at it.  Here's what I'm up to:

I have an eclectic assortment of musical instruments and I also bang on boxes, pots and pans, etc. I record these sounds into the computer using Cakewalk Pyro 2004 software and I edit and assemble them using Sony Screenblast ACID 4.0. You can listen to what I am creating by downloading MP3 files from this page. You probably ought to have a high-speed connection in order to download these because they are kind of long.