Remember those Precambrian rock noises from North Shore Rocks? Well for this piece I loaded the unprocessed recording of those rocks into a simple sampling plugin, then arpeggiated the sampler randomly within a scale. This created a cloud of stumbling chaotic rhythms that changes every time it is played back in the software.

I listened to this for a long while, fascinated by it, then decided to run it all through the Resonator in Ableton Live. This processor produces a chord of resonant pitches that react to the signal sent to the device; in this case, my falling rock sample. Since the rocks had no discernible pitches, this instantly created a musical bed of sound. I tuned the resonance to a C minor 9 chord and then automated the tuning of a fifth pitch to create a melody. A little bit more fussing about, and this is what I got.

Precambrian Resonance