MUTO by BLU

Posted on by
1

A friend sent me this link to an animated piece done on public walls in Buenos Aires and it was just too good not to post here. Fortunately, the piece is fitting for this venue due to the quality of the audio involved.

The animation is amazing, but one of the things I like especially about this piece is the sound design and music. It’s starts deceptively with typical city ambiance, but when the animation begins it quickly changes into a combination of experimental music and clever sound design carefully synchronized to the visuals.

More information about the artist and examples of their work can be found at blublu.org. The animation is by BLU assisted by Sibe, and the music / sound design is by Andrea Martignoni.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Hummingbird Morse Code

Posted on by
2

One of the things I do frequently, either for the sake of experimentation or for inspiration, is to apply multiple levels of processing with the intent of significantly manipulating an otherwise mundane sound. With a myriad of audio effects available to us this is also a good exercise in learning how certain kinds of processing impacts audio.

I started with a loop of hand drums going through Fragulator (Pluggo). Fragulator fragments the input signal into chunks, similar to grain-table synthesis. The chunks are looped at varying speeds to create a broad variety of effects. It was already drastically different from the original, so I chose to add only one more device. Harmonic Filter (Pluggo again) controls twenty-five filters with a cellular automata algorithm. I used its filter sweep mechanism to spread the stereo spectrum and provide tonal variety over the 1:25 minute recording.

Humming Bird Morse Code

Blitzen Machine

Posted on by
4

Here’s a snippet from a track I started working on today. I began by using the same techniques I described in Robot Music and in Robot Conspiracy, only I was more deliberate about the patch changes so that they lock in with the tempo a little bit more nicely.

Another technique I used was to cut up individual slices of my recordings and load the samples into Ableton’s virtual drum machine, Impulse, so I could program patterns of the samples into a variety of MIDI clips. I also used a couple of very short sections of AM Radio Static diffused with a healthy amount of reverb.

Blitzen Machine

Mississippi (Founders Mix)

Posted on by
2

AudioCookbook.org has been featured today on ccMixter, “ccMixter is a community music site featuring remixes licensed under Creative Commons where you can listen to, sample, mash-up, or interact with music in whatever way you want.” Along with the announcement, the ccMixter artist, Victor (aka fourstones) posted a remix called Mississippi (Founders Mix) using several recordings from AudioCookbook.org. Samples used include, Roof Racket, Piano Mallet Loop, Pro-One Dub, AM Radio Static, Time Expanded Radio Static, vocals by Kristin Hersh and several others. Checkout the mix on ccMixter for more information. Since the track uses several samples from AudioCookbook.org I am posting it here as today’s entry into the “One Sound Every Day” project. This marks the first time that I have not directly produced the daily sound, however, I feel this is an excellent example. If you like the track, head over to ccMixter and give some love to Victor for this tasty mashup.

Mississippi (Founders Mix)

Roof Racket

Posted on by
1

This morning at approximately 7:14 am roofers started removing four layers of asphalt tiles, along with the original cedar shakes, from the roof of my 102 year old house. Not being one to squander such opportunities, I recorded some of their hammering from inside the house. There’s some really nice wooden resonance to it. I hope you like it as much as I still am enjoying it. The photo is a detail from some of the debris that is collecting around the perimeter of my house. At this stage it was about 18″ deep.

Roof Racket