Disquiet Junto 0164 Hay Fat Choy

The Disquiet Junto this week asked for music from fireworks.

My track draws exclusively on a collection of badly shot videos from about a decade ago, when I first got a small digital camera. You can see in the video I was a newbie holding the camera sideways. The automatic focus rarely catches up with the action and the sound was recorded using an in-built mic, which clipped a bit.

The fireworks were part of a semi-regular winter solstice night that my outlaws organise outside Wagga Wagga. I won't speculate on where they got the bangers but they were good. There was a rumour that the fireworks lit on the night of my 30th were leftovers from the Sydney Olympic closing ceremony. Anyway, you can hear the appreciation of the small crowd.

The sound of fireworks, particularly the Doppler effect, suggested a descending harmonic progression. At first I wasn't sure I could get a decent kick sound from the material. It took a few attempts to get the melody and rhythm but I wanted to work with the video rather than instruments this week for various reasons. There's EQ and compression, as well as reverb and a little delay. After the first export I went back and added panning effects to generate more interesting stereo effect.