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- Sarah O’Donovan
Sarah
O’Donovan
To Promise Us Salvation
To Promise Us Salvation was a performance piece written, arranged and performed as part of the 2025 Music Technology and Production Showcase at the Millenium Theatre, Limerick, 24th April. The project aimed above all else to use written arrangement and real time audio processing to communicate emotion. Other musical elements were then improvised and informed live by this emotional narrative.
The arrangement and writing process aimed to replace and supplement conventional orchestration, utilizing a four part vocal choir (in reference to a string quartet), electric and acoustic guitar, bass, synthesizers, drums and grand piano.
This balance was hoped to be found through the process of serving the complexity of emotion, with the goal of prioritizing this narrative and letting all else be thus informed.
In order to enable each musician to perform in response to felt emotion, the project aimed to find a balance between acoustic and synthesized elements, and between predetermined and improvised performance.
The main emotional narrative was carried by a main vocal which was ran through real time audio effects, controlled by predetermined automation.
Keyboard Demo – Here
Solo Piano piece written with mind to exploring its own themes through the lens of genre, and the varying levels of definition (definity) which exist at the edges of such lenses, and what may lie between.
The piece is inspired by my own classical training, but is fueled by the diversity of my own style in the years since. It doesn’t aim to be genre less or to represent anything of the like, but aims to priorities emotion in its own failing want to exist outside the context of genre. It is an acceptance of our stylistic bias, in an attempt to use genre as a structural element, and expand the limits in which it finds itself confined in.
‘there was a village here’ - Composition and Sound Design Project
This project was designed as part of an expressionist inspired composition. All instruments were designed from a single sample, taken from a specific spot in Limerick city in which the architecture of the area creates and eerie ambience, transforming and distorting the horns of trucks in the nearby Christmas Parade that happen to be in harmony with each other. What is heard is a composition arranged using instruments designed from this audio sample, along with the sample processed and delayed at different times, utilizing the natural harmonics of the sample to create harmonic texture, effectively ‘playing’ the sample.
The piece aims to achieve a balance between ambient and conventional arrangement, and between consonance and dissonance.