PAPERWAVE Original Music Post #1

Greetings people of the Steemit Community!

In today's post, I would like to present to you a piece of music that I've composed a couple of months ago that I believe is worth sharing. First off, let me give you a little bit of background of how and why this song was made. Story Time! (Scroll down for the music itself if you're too lazy to read all this, which would be quite understandable.)

On one warm evening in May, when I was preparing to go to sleep, I suddenly remembered that my father's birthday was coming up the day after and that I haven't had a present for him. Not willing to break the yearly tradition of gifting him something unique, I threw myself towards the computer screen and started working on a song - a sort of piece that I haven't tried making before. Most of the music I make usually adheres to the principles of some popular genres like house or more structured ambient, however, this time I knew that it was going to be a piano piece. Do I know how to play piano though? No. But do I know how to perform some witchcraft and trickery with my music making software (Ableton Live 9) - Yes, I do! And so, I've set up a virtual piano instrument that was basically directed to play by something that I would refer to (for simplicity's sake) a virtual generative device, which meant that even I wouldn't really know what the end result would be. The end result satisfied me, and so I added some electronic elements to the mix, which essentially completed the project. However, my already tired brain thought of something at around 2am: "What if I synced the music I've made to some cool-looking visuals, so that the whole experience would be more enjoyable?" So I searched for another hour for some software that would generate visuals for me, but having found none that would suit my needs I realized that in the end, I would have to make the visuals myself. Did I know how to program or animate visuals? No. But did I know how to use google? Absolutely!

Fast Forward to 5am - I've learned the basics of using Processing 3 - a development environment based on JAVA (if I remember correctly) to program my own visuals. Although they were a tad basic, the overall audiovisual experience looked rather captivating. Without wasting any more time, I synced the audio to the visuals I've made, uploaded everything to some old flash drive I've found in the drawer, plugged it into our home TV next morning, and waited for my dad to come downstairs. I was overcome with joy when he told me he enjoyed it. I hope you will enjoy this too.

Some of you might be wondering where the name for the song came from. CH77 is short for "Charter 77" - a document signed by Czechoslovakian (and other) dissidents to convince the then communist government to recognize the Human Rights of their citizens. I will elaborate on this topic in later posts, as I personally find it very interesting and highly important in the history of 20th century dissidence. There was no specific reason why I chose this exact event, but at the time I was beginning to develop an idea that all my upcoming song titles should be related to certain historical events. I must note that the choice of the name did not have anything to do with the birthday, although I absolutely did not want to name the piece "Song for Dad" etc.

Thanks for the read! See you in upcoming posts!