Pat Carroll

Tag: sci-fi

  • Building Alien Structures in The Grid

    Exploring a Single, Evolving Texture

    Last night I had a great time composing in Bitwig’s The Grid. I focused on building a single, really complex texture. The music felt like it was constructing solid, physical forms rather than telling a traditional, multi-part story. The processing gave it a huge amount of energy and tactility.

    Even within that singular focus, there was still growth. I built the piece through an improvised take, recording automation across a range of parameters inside The Grid. It made me think about how a “single sound” can actually evolve: filtering, gain boosts, spatial tweaks, envelope modulation changes, increases in noise, panning voices outward, and playing with stereo space.

    These choices became the “musical narrative.” Large, reverberant spaces made the sound feel huge and slightly washy, building tension, which then resolved as I pulled the reverb back—suddenly placing the sound right in front of the listener.

    Working in The Grid was simply fun. I love this kind of composition—building a complex modular system to generate sound. The Grid remains the most intuitive object-based programming environment I’ve used. It’s not as deep as MaxMSP, but it’s still incredibly powerful. Max might be something I eventually lean into, but for now, I’m loving The Grid.

    There’s a state I slip into while writing this music where I almost lose track of how the system is actually producing its sounds. I sit back and feel like I’ve “lost control” in a good way—as if the system has developed a mind of its own. That sense of collaboration between artist and instrument is something I treasure.

    Processing

    Processing was crucial. After listening to the music of emptyset, I wanted to explore smashing voices together to form a new gestalt sound. Toward the end of The Grid’s signal chain, I combined tonal and noise oscillators before running them through various colouring tools—mainly distortions.

    There was always a tricky line between not enough and too much, but when the voices were driven together, they fused in a way that felt like gluing on overdrive. The noise filling the top end was especially interesting. Outside of The Grid, placing a reverb before an overdrive added a subtle widening and sense of realism—along with a touch of muddiness and clutter. Those “negative” qualities actually helped create and resolve tension.

    Science Fiction, Discovery, and the Unknowable

    What draws me so deeply to this music? It feels linked to the science fiction I’ve been reading—an exploration of the unknowable, the alien, the never-before-encountered. I’ve always gravitated toward novel experiences, and I want the musical equivalent of that.

    The avant-garde often reaches for this territory, but so much of the music I heard studying at the Con lacked any sort of emotional resonance for me. The technique and attitude were definitely cool, and I appreciated the desire to push the envelope, but the music didn’t feel like much to me. It was innovative in the field of compositional process and techniques, but not in the sense of musical emotional conversation. What I want is discovery, wonder, and a slight sense of danger. The music I’ve been working on feels extreme, even a bit violent, but in a way that pushes boundaries of expression, not just compositional process. This approach to music isn’t written to attempt to ‘blow up’ as an artist; it’s about exploring sound in ways that haven’t been explored before, and sharing that experience.

    One of my students said the piece “sounds like I’m in a massive spaceship,” and (obviously) I loved that comparison. There’s no literal narrative being told, no clear meaning meaning, no love story unfolding—it instead attempts to place the listener inside a structure.

    I think of the scene at the end of the film adaptation of Annihilation, when Lena encounters that alien being/structure. She’s bewildered by it; it is unknowable. Is it conscious? Is it even alive? That feeling—of encountering something truly alien and new—is what I want while making the music, and what I hope the listener experiences too.

    That sense of stepping into the unknown is exactly what I’ve always loved about science fiction, research & education, and composition.

  • Thoughts on “Raft” — Stephen Baxter

     

    I finished Raft by Stephen Baxter last night. I bought Xeelee: An Omnibus last week because I want to give the series a proper go. Raft was the first book in the collection, only 162 pages long (though written in tiny text).

    The writing felt a little cold at times. The characters weren’t very deep, and a few of them even merged in my mind as I read—everyone felt a bit two-dimensional. The setting was also surprisingly difficult to visualise. It’s a super weird universe: the Belt as a ring of cabins tied together by ropes, orbiting a burnt-out star (basically a sphere of iron being mined) floating in a nebula, itself orbiting a core. Then there’s the Raft, which I pictured as a giant bowl-shaped structure in a higher orbit. But even with those mental images, I often struggled to picture the scenes he described.

    A lot of events just… happened, without much build-up or emotional fallout. At one point the protagonist straight up murders another young boy, and there are no real repercussions. It was jarring.

    I’d heard that character work isn’t Baxter’s thing—the ideas are. And the ideas were cool, all centred around gravity and this strange fusion of physics and chemistry. It’s definitely not your typical fun, adventure-style sci-fi. The whole experience was just a bit weird, tonally and conceptually.

    While I’ve painted this in a slightly negative light, I did actually enjoy it. I just think I would’ve struggled with another hundred pages of the same. It’s a neat story with some wild ideas, even if it never quite called to me throughout the day.

    3.5/5

  • Thoughts on ‘Pandora’s Star’ – Peter F. Hamilton

    Pandora’s Star is a science fiction book by Peter F. Hamilton, published in 2004. I began this one because I absolutely loved his recent book, Exodus: Archimedes Engine, which is set in the world of an upcoming video game. I gave that one an easy 5 stars – it had such interesting concepts, setting and a good pace.

    I felt that Pandora’s Star (PS) was good, but not as good as Exodus. PS felt bigger and wider than Exodus, but I felt that the writing at times was just a little unrefined. This is the most male gaze story I’ve read in a long time (potentially ever), where every female character was overly sexualised, young and most of the times using the attractiveness for manipulative purposes. While this was most likely just Hamilton’s style of writing back then, it could also have been interpreted as the state of humanity in a world where death has basically been overcome through ‘rejuvenation’ of the body, making everyone horny, sexy 18–25 year olds. At least that’s one way you could justify it… But all the interactions between a male and female character ultimately revolved around sex and attraction, which got a little old, but (even though I’m ranting about it here) didn’t really ruin the reading experience for me. Most of the time it just led to an eye-roll and laughter.

    The concepts were pretty bloody cool though. I’m relatively new to sci-fi; I’d say I’ve read 10 sci-fi books over the years, loving some like Hyperion and Children of Time, but also not loving a few. But I could tell while reading PS that the main antagonist, MorningLightMountain, was a very special kind of alien. I loved the chapters from its perspectives, while also being terrified of it. I think the thing that made it so special to me was its non-humanness; not really angry and wanting to just go out and wipe out the human race, but doing so from a place of not having the concepts of compassion or pain. It simply needs to expand, to take the resources, to become omnipresent and immortal – whatever is required to do so. What I loved was how this was scary when contrasted to how humans think – to human nature.

    I loved how an important conversation takes place with MorningLightMountain that aims to understand its goals, but it’s not carried out by a human; it’s between the alien and an AI. I thought this was interesting, seeing two different non-human consciousnesses discussing the fate of humanity, and seeing the AI as more human than the alien.

    Something I really enjoyed about the book was its look at not only new technologies, but their effects on humanity. Specifically, the book centres around the presence of wormhole technologies. There are places that in real space are separated by huge distances, but due to wormholes, they’re effectively neighbours (linked by a vast network of trains!) This is something I’ve been interested in quite a bit recently – how certain technologies drastically shape humanity, and what human life looks like in societies where those technologies dominate.

    I did have a hard time with the lack of a clear lead character. There are a lot of characters in this book, and it didn’t feel like one was the main one the reader should be rooting for. For me, I did find myself gravitating towards the Paula Myo character, and also the storyline of Ozzy Isaacs. But it was definitely more of a large ensemble of players, rather than a clear through-line character.

    Overall, really enjoyed it. It was a little wordy – it probably could have been cut down to 800-900 pages – but it was also really immersive. Keen for the second one, but won’t jump in straight away.

    4/5