Composer Andreas Bernitt on the Circularity of Music and its Relationship with Nature
The Splice team sat down with the creator of Symbiosis: Nature's symphony, Andreas Bernitt, on how he derives inspiration from nature into his work and this sample pack.
Where do you go when you want to connect with nature and disconnect from the daily rhythms of life?
Andreas Bernitt: I usually go either for a walk in the forest, or else I go to the ocean. I really like going to the ocean and just just to listen to the waves - and listen to the sounds in general there - and dip my toes.
How does nature inspire your playing and your musical style?
Probably my biggest inspiration is when I go out into nature, because there's always sound, whether it's the wind, whether it's birds, whether it's other animals. Whether it's the rustling of the leaves on the trees.
All of that to me is music. And then there's all the things my ear can’t necessarily hear, but which is just a high or low frequency. I'm fascinated with experiments of taking frequencies in nature that our human ear cannot hear and then either pitch it up or pitch it down in order to make it audible to the human ear, and to hear what it sounds like. For example, there could be the sound of crickets, but if you slow them down all of a sudden you can hear almost like hymns singing out of that. I find that super inspiring to compose around.
What are some of your favorite sounds in nature?
The sound of wind, the sound of water. I also really like the sounds that are a little bit more alien, like the sounds of metals resonating. Now after listening to a bunch of recordings from outer space, there's a connection between some sounds recorded out in outer space, and sounds from nature. It's almost scary. A lot of people find it scary, because it represents the unknown a little bit.
When we hear the sound of the ocean, or the sound of the wind, or the sound of being inside a forest, for most people, it has a calming effect because it feels like home, it feels grounded. But then when you have sounds that are less grounded, for example the sounds from space, then it can kind of have the opposite effect and I really like those two contrasts to work with in creating.
What do you mean when you talk about the sounds of nature being neutral?
It's a super hard thing when you compose to make something which is neutral. It’s very easy to create a certain kind of mood, such as sad, or happy. I'm always aiming to the best of my abilities to create something that is as neutral as possible. I guess the sound of soft waves can be 'pretty' but that's just an interpretation - it’s just the sound of waves.
We can put all sorts of meaning into a sound from nature, but the sound by itself is neutral. When I compose and I work with layers, and also in the pack I've created, there are so many different layers you can stack to make different moods based on these layers. What I've come to realize (and it's a bit of a hard pill to swallow for myself sometimes), is that when I compose, if I remove some of the melodies, then whatever composition I've made has a tendency to open up. This is because a melody that I’ve composed might be very beautiful, but it’s my melody, and can very quickly dictate the mood. While this is very good for certain things, such as in films where the music provides the emotional undercurrent, I’ve been particularly interested in how pulling out certain melodies can open up the storytelling to be more broad and open.
Symmetry can be found throughout nature, is symmetry an important aspect of your music?
Yes and no. I think I've been told at some point that everything from the beginning is symmetric; cells splitting is basically symmetrical. But the world we live in is not symmetrical at all. All the trees would look weird if they were symmetrical, like a Lego tree. And someone like the artist Jackson Pollock- his famous artwork where it’s not random, but it's chaotic. There's some system within the chaos..
I quite often have that in mind when I compose and I work with layers. So if you only have loops where it's exactly the same all the time, it can sort of become unnatural in a way.
How can music nature be circular, and what do you find to be special about that?
Circularity influences everything I do in music. In fact, circles are a technical part of playing the violin. I always tell my students that I never stroke when I bow - I never bow back and forth. Of course, that's what I do when you look at it, but I always tell my students that everything goes around. So you always try to simulate that there's no stop and no starting starting point. The sound is almost like a frequency on a radio.
It’s like when you are listening to a radio and you don't want to be disturbed by any interference when you want to have a clear signal all the time. So I feel that when it comes to music, and also to dance, it's kind of like everything is constantly in motion.
I've worked quite a lot with dance and ballet. I'm not in any way an expert on either contemporary dance or ballet when it comes to technique, but something I've noticed a huge difference in is when the circle gets broken, or the motion momentarily stops. When this happens, all of the sudden I see a dancer or a human being trying to imitate something or tell a story. But on occasions where the circles are not broken, it’s kind of a transformation into becoming something else.
It becomes exactly like watching the birds and nature. They just move the way they are born to move, everything is so natural and fluid.
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