Music

All music on this page is copyright by Sean Crist. Feel free to download it for your own personal listening. You may also share it with your friends, as long as I'm credited. Contact me for any commercial use or derived works.

I like to write music.

I wrote a lot of music in 1987-1993 with a four-tracker, keyboard, and drum box. Then I got too busy with grad school, and I also felt like I had gone about as far as I could with the tools I had at the time.

I've been planning for years to get back into writing music, and I finally got started again in 2010. Following are the songs I've written so far.

If you want to click on just one to see what it's like, try "Vanishing Piper."

Way Out Yonder (20160814)

Somewhere out on the frontier.

Nineteen Seventy Nine (20140624)

One of my all-time favorite albums is The Pleasure Principle by Gary Numan. The main string sound on that album is the Vox Humana preset from the old Polymoog. I acquired samples of that voice and decided to make a song with them: not a cover of one of the existing songs, but a new song which sounds like it could be a "lost track" from the same recording sessions.

Vanishing Piper (20100523)

I like how this one turned out.

Slightly revised in Nov. 2013 to fix one thing that bugged me.

Cosmic Tofu Barbeque (20120306)

Groovy.

Mailing Tube (20110315)

I pulled the stopper out of a cardboard mailing tube. It made a good sound. I liked that sound, so I sampled it, looped it, added some echo, and used it as the heartbeat for this song.

Electronic Flowers (20160202)

This one sat uncompleted for over a year.

Ellis Island Ferry (20120504)

The little story in my mind here is that there were musicians from different countries who didn't speak the same languages, but they came together in the great hall while they were waiting and made some impromptu music. I doubt that that really happened, but I like the image.

We Could Join Hands (20111107)

I wrote this song back in 1993, around the time of the March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. I didn't get around to recording it until 2011.

Karaoke version

Snowfall (20120103)

I saved this to post on the first snowy day in Boston in the 2011-2012 winter.

I set myself the task of writing something in 7/4 time on a Dorian minor scale, and this is what I came up with.

Pensive (20110926)

I love ignoring the conventional cultural context of instruments and just combining them based on sound, which is how I ended up layering steel drums with a sitar.

Phase Shift (20100418)

This is mostly a pop piece, circa 1980, although the parts between the chorus are not as pop-ish.

Untitled (20100328)

I made this short little piece with Garage Band as I was getting started. I like how it turned out, but I was planning a second half to it. Then I bought Logic and got onto other projects, but I may come back to this one at some point.

	I wrote this song back in 1993, around the time of the March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. I didn't get around to recording it until 2011.
	Karaoke version