I took the idea from the last post a little further and tried a different sample; an already high pitched phrase of Rhodes electric piano. I played the sample in the software sampler, Simpler, higher and higher until it faded from an audible range. I kept going until finally, around eight octaves up, I started hearing strange artifacts from the sample. At this stage I created a MIDI clip with a scale of these sounds, then ran it through compression to bring out some of the more subtle effects, equalization to eliminate any canine-hearing-damaging-frequencies, and some processing to randomize the scale. Here’s what I ended up with.
I created this sound by resampling the output from Ableton‘s Simpler as I played a meditation bell sample that I recorded at a register far beyond the audible range. Somehow I got all these odd clicks with strange tones in between. Simpler is aptly named, being a very simple example of a software sampler, so I imagine that not much development has been put into handling samples at very high frequencies. This is fine with me since it creates these interesting glitches. Perhaps I’ll try the same technique with some other samples to see what happens.
Ali Momeni has recently posted an article about his and Robin Meier’s installation Strategies for Post-Apocalyptic Computation that was shown at the 2009 Spark Festival. Based on the article it looks as though they have renamed the piece Truce. Here’s an excerpt from the article:
Our installation explores reciprocal musical interactions between the mosquito and the computer. The computer produces a stimulus signal to which the living mosquitoes synchronize. Subsequently, the computer sings a third voice that responds to the musical inflections of the mosquitoes’ buzz. These three voices come in and out of harmony depending on the mosquitoes propensity to maintain its sync with the stimulus signal.
I made three or four visits to this fascinating installation during the festival. Here’s a segment from a recording of the piece that I made during one of my visits. To see some well produced video of the installation please visit the original article.
Testing the newest version of Photosounder gave me an opportunity to apply some Photoshop filters to sound that I had not yet tried. I experimented with halftone patterns, lens blur, pixelated color halftones, the patchwork filter, and the smudge tool.
One of the more interesting filters ended up being the plaster effect under distort. The plaster effect has a relief setting to give the image a 3D look, but also smooths the insides of areas within the image. This eliminated the noise between the speech, but also made the dialogue virtually unintelligible.
Michel Rouzic has just released version 1.4 of Photosounder that includes a new “lossless” mode so the output is identical to the input. Previously there was some loss of resolution importing the audio. From Michel:
Basically the lossless mode in question is a sort of 2D time-frequency filtering mode, kind of like some other programs like Audition 3 do by letting you airbrush on a spectrogram, that’s the idea basically. The difference here is that besides the brushes that Photosounder has, you can export the image to Photoshop and do some very precise filtering, for example making a sound feature disappear by hand, enhancing parts of a sound, subtracting to sound as I once did by making the difference between a song’s spectrogram and its instrumental version’s spectrogram to isolate the vocals, experiment with contrast, curves, levels, sharpening, various effects (I’m pretty sure you could for example try the glowing edges again and get a different sounding result).
To illustrate the lossless mode, here’s a segment of dialogue from a 1972 social commentary film in the public domain presented with the lossless mode on and again with it off. The lossless mode sounds exactly like the original waveform, while without the lossless mode the audio lacks resolution.