This tiny sample of audio represents the instant that my iPod ran out of battery life while recording a performance of myself, Nils Westdal and Graham O’Brien on drums from Monday, November 17, 2008 at Cafe Barbette in Minneapolis.
Typically when a recording is interrupted due to power loss on a digital recorder, the device is unable to save the document properly so what you end up with is a corrupt file, or worse, nothing at all. In my case I ended up with a corrupt file on the iPod of about forty five minutes of our second set. After a minute or two of searching I discovered that Audacity has a file menu option called “Import Raw”. Using this option I was able to import the unreadable content into Audacity.
I was delighted to see that most of the recording was intact. However, what was was interesting to me is that at the end of the file was about a minute or more of random white noise. I fancifully imagined this as my iPod going into a dream state as the power level was no longer adequate to support the standard functionality of the device. So here’s the first 48 milliseconds of that dream state with a three dB pad to eliminate clipping.
Ghost in the Machine
This afternoon I stumbled upon another one of my recent FM synthesis experiments from November 2, 2008. On that day I recorded eight minutes of output from select randomized programs that I produced using a MaxMSP patch called X.FM. You can hear all of the examples I have posted so far by clicking on the 
After several weeks of research I have finally made a decision and purchased a 
Over processing usually leaves you with audio that lacks it original luster, or perhaps it starts to sound like the processor itself. However, sometimes you might end up with something interesting as a result of pushing the processing beyond the normal boundaries. While listening to the 
I finally made a