Student Review: The Beats of Maria Tchijov

For my review I looked at the 10 beats and the beat composition for my friend in our class, Maria Tchijov.

I started off by listening to her composition itself. I enjoyed much of the individual beats, and especially the way she seemed to be exploring the sounds as the piece progressed. However, I think I liked her beats better than her overall composition. While the piece was very interesting, it felt like it simply moved through a list of sound files, adding some and then subtracting some. It didn't feel as layered or as temporally as complex as I would have liked.

One thing I did like was how she layed different beat patterns together. This can be especially heard around the 7 second mark. Here we have three beats, her base beat and two more rhythms built on top of this. The top two seem intentionally out of sync with the base, and as they continue for several repitions, they seperate themselves. This reminded me of the several examples we have seen in class of polytemporal experimentation, or the natural slight difference in sounds making its difference heard over time.

The beats more than made up for these small distractions though. Not only the sounds themselves, but how she used them in her final piece - slicing and recombining them at a minute level to make different sounds even out of the 10 basic beats she had at her disposal.

My favorite beat was by far Beat 5 - it sounds almost like a small metallic marble being dropped onto a hard surface and bouncing once. I really thought the sound was unique, and I really liked how she used it in her composition, splicing several of them together to make a trio of bouncing balls.

I also was really impressed the simplicity and versatility of Beat 7. This - I believe - is the beat Maria used as the base rhythm for her composition. It was reminiscent of a snare in some ways - a small, short, brief little hit with little reverb or echo. But at the same time, it felt more hollow than a snare hit or any other sort of drum. It almost felt like it was only defined by its start and finish - the middle, as short as it was, was irrelevant. Again, I really enjoyed how she used this small basic unit to make the underlying rhythm, a series of a series of varied repetitions of this one sound.

For her more unusual beats, I particularly enjoyed Beats 8 and 9. Beat 8 sounds to me like a stone moving across a table - a nice, slow grating noise. I thought it was particularly neat because although a beat, it conveys a definite sense of movement even in one instance, whereas most of her other sounds conveyed stopping or starting, but only suggested action with repetition. Beat 9 was similar in that it was a little longer, but as the beat ends it feels like it as coming to some form of close. It doesn't sound like movement, or perhaps movement that is coming to a wall or the edge of the table and stopping. Really, this sound mostly reminds me of a frog's ribbit - I am very curious as to how she was able to make this sound, and what software she used.

Overall I was very impressed. I wish there had been a little more complex layering and perhaps even repition of certain beats used multiple times in her composition, but perhaps she was trying to showcase the wonderful diversity and creativity of her beats, which she more than accomplished.