Choose a sound. It could be the barking of a dog or the crackling of fire. Other musicians would not think of making music from these everyday sounds, but Nick Koenig has for over a decade. Nick is an exceptional musician with a distinct ear for found sounds. He makes music out of existing sounds and that is a talent that has brought him great success over the years.
Manipulating Music
Nick Koenig is known as “Hot Sugar” and he records sounds, manipulating them to create songs for himself and in collaboration with other artists. His kind of music is called ‘associative music,’ which is associated with sound. The way Nick creates music is to use the sound so that the listener can connect with the melody behind the sound that he/she is already familiar with.
Capturing Sound
According to Nick, he captures the sounds in the same manner as the photograph captures images. Once it appears poetic, he will make a recording of the sound. He chooses the instruments as it relates to the song he is creating, deciding which guitar or drum plays the sound. However, before he can create music from the sound, he has to make instruments that will do justice to the sound. That is how melodies are created by Nick Koenig. Now, let’s get an in-depth look into music and modern culture.
The Musical Connection
Music is one of the linguistic chains or connections that are part of the soundtrack (let’s remember that the soundtrack is also made up of voices, noises and silences), and as people commonly understand it, it is usually, together with the text, another problem for the unity of the soundtrack, both for its referential value and for the possible functions it can assume in a narrative sequence, even if it lacks semantic value. In Nick’s case, he looks for the connection of sound to the listener.
The Listener
As autonomous art, each song carries its own meanings. Its qualities are capable of provoking sentimental projections that will eventually depend on the listener’s culture. On the other hand, music presents a double aspect: the aesthetic-formal and the symbolic-unconscious. It is the latter that causes the inarticulate symbolic structures of the deep mind to emerge into consciousness and become articulated. It is the same way with sound within music.
Provoking Associations
All music, known or relatively new, will provoke the same associations or mental images and it will be difficult to organically integrate it into the overall invoice that an audiovisual work requires. This impossibility will be greater, depending on how great the recognition by the listener of the musical language used. Theme music is equivalent to a certain figurative image, which it is impossible to get rid of. Therefore, it will have destroyed the known musical “image” and with it, in some way, the association with the sound, thus avoiding the cliché and the stereotype.
Sound Language
If you now consider the text as a sound language, and move the music from the level of autonomous signification to another level where the treatment of sound prevails instead of the thematic treatment, you will be able to achieve a rapprochement between both linguistic connections. The lack of structural correspondence between the verbal and musical acoustic chain is where many musicians missed the mark. Nick Koenig has brought something new to the modern culture. Hot Sugar continues to create musical melodies in a unique way.
