Labwerks provides a safe space for experimentation with musical ideas. Work is underway in six corners of the lab:
Rhythm
Tempo
Melody
Harmony
Progressions
Lyrics
Rhythm is music’s pattern in time. Whatever other elements a piece of music may have, such as melody and harmony, the one indispensable element is rhythm. In this corner of the lab, I focus on the time signatures that you don’t hear every day.
The tempo of a piece of music is its speed. In this corner of the lab, I explore what happens when you take beats per minute to the extremes.
A melody is a sequence of single notes. In this corner of the lab, I’m aiming to test the boundaries and see where melody can go when you experiment with different scales.
Harmony is the sound of two or more notes played or sung at the same time. If you think of melody as the horizontal aspect of music, then harmony is the vertical. In this corner of the lab, I look at the way in which harmonies and chords are constructed and how you can transform the mood of a piece by breaking away from the norm.
Progressions take harmony a little further. Nearly all Western music, from classical to pop, is based on sequences of chords, sometimes extremely simple and predictable, sometimes highly convoluted. In this corner of the lab, I will be exploring chord progressions and experimenting with ideas that take me out of my comfort zone.
Lyrics are, of course, the words of a song or any type of other vocal music. In this corner of the lab, I’m looking at the potential for lifting a song to another level through the appropriate use of words, exploring the particular difficulties of different musical genres.