Author: Fred Wu

 
Trinity is an electronic music composition that I composed for my capstone project. The idea of this project initially comes from the number “three”. “Three”is a very crucial idea in the world of numerology. Some of this project is actually inspired by my research paper, which is about the Hollywood film music guru, Hans Zimmer. The most distinctive feature of Hans Zimmer’s music is the massive use of electronic synthesizers. Also, when he’s producing the music for Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy, there are three themes for Batman. The first theme that Nolan what is the theme of Batman, which is a very percussive electronic piece of music. The second theme that Nolan wants is the theme of the alter ego of Batman, Bruce Wayne, which is a rather sad but beautiful orchestral piece of music. But there has to be a third theme because the two split personalities of Bruce Wayne have to come to one entity in the end, for which Hans Zimmer created an electronic piece of music with some resemblance of the orchestral Bruce Wayne theme. His way of composing gives me a lot of inspirations. You can even argue that what I’m trying to accomplish in my capstone is an attempt to mimic Hans Zimmer’s music. But of course, compared to Hans Zimmer, I still have much to learn.
The software that I initially choose to work on my project on is a software made by Apple called Logic Pro X, which you can say is a fancier version of GarageBand. And the hardware that I used to make this project is a MIDI keyboard called Keystation 61 made by M-Audio. I made the first version of Trinity with Logic Pro X mainly. I find that the built-in digital synth pad and arpeggiators very helpful in terms of composing. Sometimes you can press several keys on your MIDI keyboard and the arpeggiators will automatically give you a tune. The second take of my composition is recorded with a software called Ableton Live, which is a professional electronic music production software. Here, I want to push the limits of the arpeggiator and created a more or less experimental take of the original version. And for the third version, I went back to Logic Pro X and this time I only use one synthesizer. Since we have experimented with so many different emotions in the previous takes, such as happiness or sadness. I want to go deep and experiment with something different with this third version, which is the emotion of fear or horror. Overall, you can say this project is like a kaleidoscope, which is something that has limited elements. But every time you twist it, you will always get something different.