Time Expanded Radio Static

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

8 thoughts on “Time Expanded Radio Static

  1. Sounds like you’ve digitally trapped the ghost of Eric Satie at 6 seconds, and he’s saying “I hurt”.

  2. No offense, but this isn’t a very good example of the current state of time stretching. Altering the size of your buffer along with the speed in which you’re iterating over it can all but remove stuttering. Transitional smoothing and multiple buffers can help too.

  3. Hey, Inno. Can you post an example for us? On this recording I was over using time expansion purposefully for the sake of experimenting, but I’d love to hear a contrasting usage of the effect.

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  5. That is an eerie sounding clip. Thanks for posting. It definitely stutters less than my example as well. I will have to give your technique a shot next time. Cheers!

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