MRH: Adrienne mentioned that you came up with some inventive sounds, and I guess for me, when you’re spotting an episode and you realize the specific point where score is necessary, what goes through your mind, in terms of you thinking ‘I’m going to take this non-traditional thing and I’m going to apply to that, and I think I’m going to come up with a really interesting sound and develop that into a cue?’

PC: Adrienne is very creative with descriptions. I was sitting there in the spotting session.  I was a little nervous because this was my first real spotting session, and we’re watching the first opening sequence – I can’t remember exactly what was happening in the scene – but then Adrienne turns to me and just goes ‘Reverse pterodactyl noises,’ and I was thinking ‘Okay – How - What is that? What does that mean? How am I going to do that?’

I did come up with some reverse Pterodactyl noises as it turned out, but she would usually come up with these very interesting ways of [describing] the sound she was hearing, and I would usually take that and assess the mood of the scene and put it all together, and hopefully come up with something that she likes.

MRH: From your end, you’ve got an existing sense of the abstract. You have a familiarity/interest with those sounds, and I guess maybe from your background you know how to manipulate them into certain ways so you can create musical sounds.

PC: Yeah, for sure. I was really into playing with ‘found sound’ early on when I was playing with samplers.

Actually, two of the things I did for Tom’s class when I was at OCAD was I did a whole piece that was just sounds of me washing the dishes, but then I chopped it all up and turned it into this whole other thing [that] starts off as the sounds of someone washing the dishes, and then by the end it basically turned into almost a bass track.

I did another one where I just took tones of toys and sampled those and made a thing, and more recently I’ve been playing a lot with circuit bending toys. You basically buy these cheap toys at Value Village for $3 (usually they’re little toy keyboards or talking animals) and you rip them open and you start playing around with the different components and short-circuiting them and installing different ‘parts,’ and you can make them do these weird, freak-out noises.

Everybody’s always trying to find the next new sound, trying to do something that no one else is doing. I’ve gotten together a few times with Rob Carli, who’s a really great composer, and we’ve done really weird samplings sessions - sampling pianos in weird ways, or we went to a metal studio and we made a whole library out of playing with pieces of metal.

People are always trying to come up with the next sound that not everybody has. Often I’ll be watching a television series, and I’ll be like ‘Oh, that’s tornado blast from this sound library or whatever,' and I’ve used that before, and it sort of sucks... That’s sort of where the circuit bending and stuff [comes from]: you try and find things that no one else has to make your sound sonically unique.

MRH: Have you heard the soundtrack to Forbidden Planet (1956)?

PC:  No, I haven’t.

MRH: Forbidden Planet was composed by Louis and Bebe Barron, and they built circuits, and the entire score is just the circuits. The way they described it, they birthed the circuits, they pushed them to the extremes of their existence, and let them flare out, and they took those sounds and using reel-to-reel tape recorders, looped and played with different speeds, echoes, and so on, and eventually they crafted it all together. It sounds abstract but there are particular motifs that do recur throughout the score.

It’s one of the most amazing scores from the fifties, but unfortunately for the composers, because of union regulations, they were not allowed to work on another studio production. They did a couple of short films, but that one score remains an icon of early electronic sounds.

PC: That sounds amazing. I will totally check that out.

MRH: Your search for unusual sounds also reminded of Michael Gordon’s score for Decasia (2002), a sort-of documentary in which disintegrating nitrate film from a wide variety of sources is edited into thematic suites, and for one of the segments, Gordon’s main instruments were rusty car wheels being scraped en masse with gradual orchestral accompaniment

PC: Neat.