Project #2: Dangerous Road

Composer Bio Dan Conroy (b. 1985) is a student at The University of Nevada Reno. He is working on his Bachelor of Arts in Advertising through the Reynolds School of Journalism while also pursuing a minor in Digital Media through the Church School of Fine Arts. Through the Digital Media program he was able to take an electronic music composition class with Jean-Paul Perrotte in conjunction with his Digital Media studies and began composing music as a result of the class. He will graduate from UNR in May, 2012 and hopes to follow his studies into a career. Program Notes Dangerous Road is an audiovisual journey inspired by driving on unknown, dark, snowy roads, never knowing what will appear around the next corner. The song, comprised of concrete sounds and sounds created in the studio, brings the listener into the vehicle and keeps them on the edge of their seat. Surprises jump out from the speakers and the screen and into the eyes and ears of the listener with the intent of leaving them both scared and alert, just as one must be when driving down a new Dangerous Road.

Project #1: Battle Of The Toys

For my first audio piece for Jean Paul's Electronic Music Composition class we really experimented with what Pro Tools was capable of doing and oriented ourselves with the program and recording in general. For my experimental composition I used all concrete sounds from objects I brought into the studio and some I recorded outside of it with the ZOOM recorder. My final product is an audio piece which I titled "Battle Of The Toys." Uncertain on what my final sound would be, I experimented with the effects in pro tools such as the flanger, pitch shift, reverb and more. The product turned out to be a piece which reminded me of playing with action figures, cars and other various toys as a kid. This resemblance to the toys made me want to make a stop motion animation of toys, moving around like I would have played with them as a little kid. It was my first time working with stop motion and I enjoyed it, but I had no idea how many pictures it actually took. I ended up going for 10 frames per second, and to do this I shot over 600 pictures. The end result is an audio piece that imitates children playing with toys while the visual aspect gives the toys a life of their own.