Hello, my name is Eleanor Fontaine. I am a multi-instrumentalist musician, producer, and audio engineer residing in Portland, OR.
My first forays into electronic synthesis were in chiptunes derived from emulations of the 2A03 sound card in the original NES game console in my teen years. This in part led to an ongoing 15 year career in music production and audio engineering.
I have always been inspired by the likes of Devin Townsend, Allessandro Cortini, Richard D. James and others that utilize sound sources in novel ways detached from the concept of their origin. In such a way, a sound is transmuted into what I view as perceptual magic. I am also heavily inspired by the works of Wendy Carlos in her ability to summon via synthesis the emotional impact and memory of all variety of physical acoustic instrumentation in an uncannily believable manner.
My guitar career started out in heavy metal, which combined with my love of the waveforms of early gaming consoles led to viewing my high gain guitar tone as more of a synth tone with the guitar as it's oscillator source. I was delighted to learn of polyphonic guitar technologies around 2014, and modified my first guitar with Cycfi Nu polyphonic pickups around 2018 which unlocked a whole universe of waveshaping and timbrel possibilities.
When I first started producing with polyphonic guitar I immediately found that it re-contextualizes electric guitar as a new instrument that can range from a whole acoustic guitar ensemble, to harpsichord, to vibraphone to brass sections and all variety of synthesized timbres. The sounds of that era's experimentation can be found in songs from my progressive rock project Hard Neutral.
Eleanor is no stranger to SynQuaNon and has posted several blogs in the past:
During the song creation process Eleanor made several videos detailing the techniques she used on the Demo System:
Here are sound snippets created by Eleanor during composition of her song:
Her final composition is called Cascade:
Comments