Martin Meinerz

21May/100

Women in Art, Literature, and Music

This is a project I recently completed for my Women in Art, Literature, and Music class. Throughout the course we talked about early feminist artists that explored what it means to be a woman. I wanted to create a piece that could go through the process of finding itself, and stay "feminine" in both form and content. This piece was made using a PureData patch I built last fall that plays sound clips randomly. I really wanted the computer to be composing the music because creation has always been associated with femininity, and by giving the computer/random chance the power to create the piece flows more organically than a straight composition. I chose to use words that I found in the novel How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez. The words I plucked from the pages have very strong emotional ties with first wave feminism, and also the struggle that the characters in the novel were going through as they tried to hold on to their traditional beliefs as they relocated to the U.S.

The sounds in this piece were made from recordings of the characters names in the book, text to speech software, and a bass guitar.

WomenProj

28Jan/10Off

Bass Environments

I have always wanted to do an improv bass recording but make it more of a sonic art piece rather than just your ordinary section of music. I wanted to make something that had a lot of movement back and forth, but also has a sense of depth so you can just close your eyes and feel like you are inside the work rather than just listening to it. It ended up being around 16 minutes, so this recording is just a small 6 minute excerpt of the original.

This piece was designed for a surround sound environment, but if you don't have that, a high quality set of headphones will work fine.

Environments

26Dec/09Off

Minimalism

This is a selection of Minimalist pieces that I created. Minimalism is defined as movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features. I only recently started to delve into this style of music and creating and to me these pieces are about creating the most interesting content you can with only one or two variables, for example, music with only one instrument or sonic art pieces created using only a few sound files.

These works are explorations into minimalism through my variation of improvisational trance music.
Open

Fish's Dance Club

This is a piece that I created using only 4 short sounds, a truck horn, a door latch, a beep, and an amp tube buzzing.

4soundsong

26Dec/09Off

In Limbo

This a is a short song that I created. A segment of it was later used in a Nick Allen short film called "In Limbo" which can be seen on www.offscreenproductions.com.

Song For Nick

26Dec/09Off

Einstein

This is a dialog piece that I created for a gallery performance in early December of 2009. This piece focuses on Albert Einstein's brain and thought process after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I view the A-bombs as the point in which Einstein's science is in direct conflict with his ideals as a pacifist, and this conflict was what I wanted to focus on while also using a lot of time and timbre manipulation to draw parallels between Einstein as a person and his theories of Special and General Relativity. I recorded people reading quotes and excerpts from Einstein's letters, and then used only those original recordings to make every sound in this piece.

Einstein

14Dec/09Off

Dirt

Dirt

This is is a piece that I created for a gallery performance in early December 2009. The focus of this piece is how the internet has affected the porn industry.