Here’s a loop that I played on my Korg MS2000 during a recent jam session. I was sending the MS2K an external synchronization signal via MIDI and it sounds as if the instrument was laboring to lock in with the clock.
I added some warp markers to tighten it up a bit, but it still has a warped and distorted quality from the processing on the MS2K. John Cage said, “There is no noise. Only sound.”
Warped MS2K Noise
Here’s a five bar loop of the pedal noise from the last entry. This time with no processing at all except a bit of amp modeling. In the last example I had equalized away most of the low frequencies.
This version is fairly clean so you can hear the pedal knocking sound followed by the dissonance as all of the Rhodes tines vibrate slightly after the pedal is depressed.
Unprocessed and Looped Rhodes Pedal Noise
What you hear in this clip is all of the processed noise extracted from 1972 Social Commentary Degraded with a Halftone Pattern pasted together. I ran the lot through a short ping pong delay to give give it some stereo processing. Secondly, I decided to leave this file in its 48kHz 24bit state before rendering the MP3. This way you can tell whether or not you have the latest Flash plugin. I just played it on a computer with an older version of Flash Player 10 and got some horrible crackling in the playback, however, if I play it in QuickTime by clicking the link it sounds fine. If you get the same problem, try upgrading your Flash plugin in the browser to fix it.
Processed Noise from 1972 Dialogue
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
Slashdot.org has an article about a site that is hosting the sounds of thirty five different hard drives failing. Although the recording quality is generally poor there are some really interesting sounds including a Maxtor drive with a stuck spindle producing a “futuristic cell phone melody”. You can read the article and checkout the sounds here, although it might be a bit busy due to the site being slashdotted.
Also, click the image to see a video of a remix of Nude by Radiohead made entirely out of sounds captured from old computer peripherals including a dot matrix printer, scanner, cassette drive, hard drives, and so on. The remix and video was created by Glasgow based artist James Houston.