Odyssey experience helps students
plug in to electronic instruments
By Rachel Thomas '14
Ryan Gaston '12 started playing piano (he thinks)
when he was five years old.
His parents didn't make him do it.
"I think it
was probably quite a long time before my parents realized that I was playing,"
Gaston says. "I never had lessons or anything else for it."
One day, when he
was at home sick, there happened to be a keyboard in the house. He decided to
try it out.
"That's how I got started with music," says Gaston, a Booneville,
Ark., native. "And I just kept doing it, and I started composing."
He felt he
was better at doing that than he was at speaking.
"To this day, the thoughts
I have that I feel aren't best suited to words I try to express through music,"
he says.
By age 15, he was "pretty tired" of the piano and the trumpet, which
he picked up at age 10.
"I'd reached all the limits there, so I thought,
‘What's going to be a new instrument that I can use that I'm not going to find
limitations with so quickly?'" says Gaston. "So I thought, ‘Well, I can use an
electronic instrument because, really, they can do most anything."
He bought
a relatively inexpensive synthesizer. He soon realized that it was going to be
able to do much more than a piano, which can only play certain notes and has a
static timbre, meaning that a piano always sounds like a piano.
"Whereas,
with an electronic instrument, I can do all those little notes between the keys,
and it can produce any timbre that you could think of, theoretically," he says.
Since then, Gaston has experimented with other ways to make electronic music,
including circuit bending — redesigning audio circuits — and software design.
"You know, people have been doing instrumental composition since before we're
really aware of," he says. "Everyone talks about the ancient Greeks beginning
it, but who knows if that's actually the case?"
Electronic composition really
formally started around the 1940s, so it's an art form that's only about 70
years old now, Gaston says.
"So I think it's interesting because there's
really no known codification to it yet, no one's decided what it's for, or what
it's not for, so it feels less limiting than writing for a traditional
ensemble," he says.
When Gaston arrived at Hendrix, he was unsure of his
major. He considered physics, but he soon discovered he liked being taught music
as much as he liked teaching himself.
"I came here and just hit it off really
well with the professors, I was really pleased with the way they taught ... so
it just wound up working really well," Gaston says. "I thought I'd try it out,
see if a music degree would work for me, and it turned out that I really was
genuinely interested in academic composition, more than just doing things as a
hobby. So I continued with it."
Last year, Gaston won top honors at the
University of Louisville Young Composer Competition for New Electro-Acoustic
Music with his original piece "Nocturne: Crickets (Inside & Out)."
He also
earned Odyssey funding for an electronic music research project.
With the
help of Hendrix music professors Dr. Karen Griebling and Dr. John Krebs, he
convinced the Odyssey Office to use the money to purchase equipment for a modest
electronic music studio.
The music department had recently received a
donation of Pro Tools, Finale, and Sibelius software, along with a MIDI
controller/USB sound card. Gaston created a small body of audio analysis and
processing software and donated an amplifier to the department. Odyssey funding
was used to purchase a modular synthesizer custom-made by Michael Lamay, along
with several utility modules.
"It was great for me that they were so
flexible in helping me figure out what I wanted to do, and helping me to provide
some more opportunities for people who will be coming through in the future," he
says.
Now that he's graduated, Gaston is looking at several graduate programs
in music, including one in electronic composition and another one in instrument
design.
Rachel Thomas '14 is an English Studies major from Fayetteville, Ark.