Signs of Spring are making themselves heard in Minneapolis. For example, I recorded the sound of snow quickly melting into a storm drain near the Mississippi river in Minneapolis last night. The temperature was approaching fifty degrees Fahrenheit (ten Centigrade) creating a steady stream of water pouring into a grate adjacent to a cobble stone street. The sound was loud enough to capture my attention as I cycled past it, and nearly drowned (no pun intended) out the ambient noise of traffic and a nearby power plant.
I’ve had a brilliant few last days, and amongst the highlights were the acquisition of a used AKAI 4000d tape machine. A bit on the machine first – I got it through an very healthy program called freecycle.org here in the UK. I simply put an ad up asking if anyone had any old noise making bits that they didn’t use anymore, and I got a response from a decent bloke who offered me a tape machine he couldn’t get to use.
Delighted I picked it up, he showed me how to thread the tape (a bit before my time you see…) and such. I was immensely grateful and helped him out with some technical computer bits out of gratitude.
Story over, now for the fun. I’ve hooked my Tape machine up to the PC, and routed it through a focusrite preamp and sherman filterbank. I love the retro psychedelic sound – type stuff, and was playing around with feedback loops and such. It turned into a jam, with my loops and samples, and feedback etc. and (i’m not sure if this is meant to happen) but the fast forwarding and rewinding of the tape picked up all the noise, but in super high speed. I think this sounds brilliant. Check it out!
The Sound Garden project by Norbert Herber was recently installed at the 2009 Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts. By good fortune I was in the right place at the right time and had the opportunity to discuss the work with the artist at the event.
The installation includes multiple channels of speakers and a variety of sensors where the installation is installed. It is also linked to a web application where sound files are “planted” and “pruned” by site visitors. Visitors to the physical location for the installation influence the audio processing by interacting with various sensors in the space.
A more thorough explanation of Norbert’s piece is available on his site. Norbert gave me permission to capture a segment from the audio stream for the purpose of this article. Before doing so I planted one of my own files from Audio Cookbook to influence the output.
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.