If you had a chance to hear Johannes Kreidler’s piece, Product Placement, made up of 70,200 samples in 0:33 seconds, then you probably thought is sounded a lot like radio static. To me it sounds like parts of it were time compressed and probably up-pitched, but altogether quite an achievement. Although, you might find the style of Akufen’s piece, Deck the House, more musical.
Rather than time compress the radio static I posted yesterday, I had a go at time expanding it. Time expansion works by stretching waveforms without changing the pitch. This can have some odd results when time expanding by a significant amount. You will often hear a repetitive stuttering, or garbled effect, like what’s happening in this example. In the image you can see the garbled sections represented as rectangular patterns that occur throughout the waveform.
Time Expanded Radio Static
As I have mentioned in previous articles, I love knobs. This includes the tuning knob on AM/FM radios. For today’s sound I decided to record my old Panasonic tuner. I took a mono direct signal into my M-Audio Firewire 410 and started tuning. What I was after is that static sound between stations, and the tiny chunks of speech and music that pop through as one spins the dial. I started with FM, switched to AM, and then back to FM recording close to ten minutes worth of audio. This particular tuner wasn’t much good for producing the gliding theremin like tones you sometimes hear, but I got some good static and random micro-clips of music and speech. Here’s a snapshot of one of the sections I’m satisfied with.
Nils Westdal and I recorded these bells for a percussive element in one of those tracks that have yet to see the light day. These beautiful solid brass bells have more than twenty seconds of decay. We recorded nineteen of those seconds. We used an AKG c4000b large diaphragm condenser microphone to capture the sound. The c4000b is one of the most versatile and sensitive mics I’ve used. It’s perfect for capturing all that sustain and high frequency goodness. Take a deep breath, cross your legs, close your eyes and press play. 
To create this sound I started by programming a beat. In this case I pitched each slice of the beat individually to create a variety of pitches in the loop. Once I was satisfied with it I rendered it to a clip and applied a plugin by Paul Kellett (