Guest composer Sergei Kofman Exploring Reverb as a Creative Tool

My name is Sergei.

I'm a composer and producer.

I make music as Measure and I make experimental electronic music.

I do a little bit of film scoring, a little bit of scoring for live dance projects.

I also play live electronic music.

I kind of live in a world between electronic production and composition for concert works, anything in between.

I think music tends to be the most successful when it takes into account how it's going to be perceived or how it's going to be consumed.

Like a lot of music that's written for the concert hall, like you think of like Beethoven's Fifth Symphony or something, does really well because it takes into account where the listener is going to be, how the listener is going to experience it.

So for a lot of music that is recorded, it's experienced by people wearing headphones or in speakers in their rooms in a really specific place.

And you often have extremely direct access to those people's ears and how they're listening.

So reverb is an extremely powerful tool to kind of shape the space where the music exists or even elements of that music.

One really powerful tool for music in general is playing with people's expectation.

So a lot of sounds, you have a certain connotation with the kind of space that it's going to be heard in or what the reverb for it is.

And it can be cool to use reverb to sort of like mess up with that expectation a little bit.

Like for example, if you have a long tail reverb, or a big, like a reverb that sounds like a big room, you expect to hear that for a long time.

So if you have a big reverb and then you suddenly cut it off completely, it's very unexpected because you expected that reverb tail to go for a long time.

And then it's like a nice little piece of, like a nice little surprise or a nice little ear candy.

I wrote this piece called "Voices in the Whir," which is written with a very particular piano in mind.

It's this very particular set of sounds that I was trying to create with it.

And for that piece, it was recorded in a way to make it seem really close and personal and like right in front of you, but at the same time, kind of bigger and more encompassing.

So the way that you record and the way that you use reverb and the way that you kind of design the space around the sound can really influence the way that a piece is experienced by the listener.

So reverb is really important for that.

For a lot of music that's written for recorded mediums, reverb can be just as much a part of the composition as the notes themselves.

So it's something to really think about.

It's a piece that's very close to my heart and it's something that I wrote in a very particular time in my life.

I think it really expresses a lot of the things that I was going through at that time.

It's a piece that kind of combines a lot of the things that I'm really interested in musically.

It has a lot of elements of classical music, a lot of elements of electronic music, and it's kind of this hybrid piece that really speaks to the kind of music that I like to make.

And it's something that I'm really proud of.

I think it's a really beautiful piece and it's something that I hope other people can find some beauty in as well.

I hope it can resonate with them in the same way that it resonates with me.

When I'm creating music, I think a lot about how the listener is going to experience it.

And I think a lot about how I want them to feel when they're listening to it.

And I think reverb is a really powerful tool to kind of shape that experience and shape that feeling.

It's something that I use a lot in my music and it's something that I think can really add a lot of depth and a lot of emotion to a piece.

So it's something that I really pay a lot of attention to and something that I think is really important in the music that I make.

So when you're writing music, think about how you can use reverb to kind of shape the space and shape the feeling of the piece and how you can use it to kind of enhance the experience for the listener.