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
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.
I can’t seem to get enough robot action these days. Robots have lots of personality. Much more than politicians who convene in St. Paul. I used a similar technique to get this sound as I did for
I looped this section of radio static where I was quickly swapping between two channels of music with the analogue dial. Although cacophonous, it has a strangely attractive rhythmic and musical quality to it. So, of course that led me to experiment with some processing. I did not want to manipulate it too much so I could illustrate the drunken quality to the passage as it repeats, but I added a short, modulated, stereo delay to create some imaging on the mono recording. After that I decided to map a couple of controllers to the left and right feedback of the delay, allowing me to over saturate the output dynamically over the recording’s one minute and six seconds duration.
If you had a chance to hear Johannes Kreidler’s piece,