Secluded Garden

Woah... nice questions (and points made)

Which reminds me, I've been listening to this piece a lot lately, I just find it very relaxing and smooth. Great job there, Mike, once again

I think it's rather cool

My only quip is the fact that sometimes the tones seem to overload one another, it might just be my headphones, but I think it creates a good ambience.

It's easy to make a mental picture, although I kind of pictured some kind of an abandoned insane asylum instead of a garden at times

I think you did a good job

Really fascinating to listen to the changes in sound, which I hear almost as a "harmonic progression".

This is exactly how I hear it. The "frozen" section around the middle is followed by warmer sonorities at the end, for example. Definitely my (quasi-)programmatic intent.

I'd really love to listen to a longer version of a piece like this too. In that case however it would be nice to extend the pitch range a bit (looking at a sonogram it seems to pretty much stay between about 80 Hz and 1300 Hz, so you'd easily have two more octaves at either end of the spectrum at your disposal, even more at the upper end). I think opening it to a greater pitch range (perhaps only for a small section in the piece) would make it sound even richer and more colourful than it already is.

I honestly hadn't considered extending this piece. It sounds very "finished" to me as it is right now - maybe that effect is simply exaggerated by the fact that it was me who wrote it. I'll consider adding it to my never-ending invisible list of pieces to make longer...

I'm also playing around with the sample right now, and it sounds a bit cheesy when transposed up a few octaves. If I were to extend the work and incorporate a wider range of pitches, I'd probably have to create the sounds from scratch. It was basically my intention to have everything crammed into that small range, though, because that's what gives the piece its feeling of being contained in statis. Especially around the middle section - I liked the way that produces an effect akin to the passage of time stopping, as someone else put it.

Oh, and I removed some frequencies because they were physically hurting my ears.

But what do you actually want? Do you want it to be heard as a zoom on a piano sound, an exploration of its overtones, or do you want it to be heard as an absolute piece of music that is entirely independant of how it was created?

The sound is intended to be consumed as an absolute in itself, so no reference to the piano chord. What you mentioned is an interesting idea, however - I'll do some experimentation at some point.

Thank you very much for your insightful questions and comments. Also thanks to juji (again!) and Will.