Ping & Peal

Ping & Peal is a piece for finger cymbals and tape that I wrote for Creativity November--an extended version of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) that I participate in with several friends from grad school. The rules are simple: Pick a creative project. Work starts on the first of November and must be completed by the third of December. Projects have to be started and finished within that time frame. Status updates are over doughnuts at 10 PM on Tuesday nights. Anyone who doesn't finish their project owes the rest of the participants a cake. I like to use this time to try out new tools and new techniques, and in 2018 I chose to play with some notational techniques I started using in Austerity. The tape part is notated in the sheet music much like it appears on computer--as a collection of waveforms showing volume across time. Both the live sounds and the pre-recorded sounds, with few exceptions, come from a pair of finger cymbals, which are struck together, dampened, scraped, and subjected to a number of digital manipulations.