The GLOSS project encouraged people to explore and use its samples to create their own musical compositions and soundscapes. Here are some examples.
Three Rooms for Cora (2024) is a suite of three contrasting pieces by Andrew Hugill that use only domestic sounds from the Grainger house in White Plains. In each piece you hear the raw samples first, then some processing is applied. The three pieces are:
- Percy’s Room (0′ 38″). Includes: music cabinet drawers; wardrobe doors and handles; various lights and candlesticks.
- Elsie’s Room (2′ 08″). Includes: bookcase cabinets; dressing table drawers; plant stand; room lights.
- Ella’s Room (4′ 53″). Built around the repeating sound of a toy dancing bear, decorated with the lights on the east wall.
Grainger Gamelan (2024) is an original composition by Andrew Hugill that treats all the samples and sounds of the house as a potential gamelan orchestra (Grainger himself made some gamelan transcriptions) and imitates the style of Javanese traditional music. The sounds are not processed at all, apart from one of the Chinese Gongs which is dropped a couple of octaves to create the big gong sound. The main tune is played on piano and harmonium, accompanied by staff bells and right hand piano, with fast decoration on xylophone. Percussive sounds and interjections are provided by lighting and pieces of furniture. The piece opens with the sound of a tap running in the bathroom.
Free Country (2024) by Andrew Hugill takes the listener on a sonic journey from Percy Grainger’s most famous composition Country Gardens to the electronic ‘Free Music’ that he created at White Plains during the last decades of his life. The recordings that start and end the piece were both made by Grainger himself, one at the piano, the other at a Free Music machine. There is also a sample of the ‘Butterfly Piano’, a microtonal instrument that he built to simulate the effect of a continuous pitch glide when playing a fast chromatic scale. The remaining samples are all from the GLOSS collection, including an improvisation on the autoharp and an array of lights and furniture. These samples are sometimes processed quite heavily and sometimes in their raw state.
Regresso ao Porto (2007) is a video piece by Matt McGarrell that was created from GLOSS samples of bells and gongs. The video was made in Nazaré, Portugal, January 2007, using a Palm Treo.