9weeks

I had to start from scratch 3 times this week. Finally, on the 3rd attempt, I went into the desired direction. The first 2 attempts failed 2-fold: they lacked any standards for coherency, and they did not deviate enough from previous attempts. Overall I think I spent a good 8 hours this week; the last half of that time was spent directly working on the final piece.

This week I decided to strip about 300ms from the beginning of the sample and only those frequencies above 10,000Hz. These would be the frequencies just at the top of the spectrum–you know the ones that almost hurt your ears. I spent quite a lot of time stretching the audio and pushing and pulling it around the spectrum. Eventually I managed to have it slide into somewhere close to the C4 range, and all of a sudden this jazz-like “melody” appeared. So i began sequencing the bare formants/partials themselves.

I’m finding that I’m working on this project, that my process is more and more about timbre and texture than melody. Although this is a step in the right direction in moving towards melodic ideas, it’s still more of a soundscape than the makings of a “song.”

If anyone doesn’t believe me that this was all extrapolated from my 10 second clip, I am willing to share my FL Studio work file for anyone who wants to peek at the process.

I spent longer on this week than the others (almost an hour and a half!). I was very enthusiastic going into it considering my realization last week that there are no limits to this. The process becomes the instrument, and the only limit is one’s approach to the process.
I started with the same file i had last week because I liked my new synth sounds. This week was meant to take the next step in creating a fully functional sonic universe that appears to be without the limits of the 10 second source audio.

There are still artifacts i suppose, and it is still somewhat sloppy (i.e., uncontrolled) in certain aspects,but i am getting closer to extracting ‘pure sound’ and removing it completely from any indication that it used to be a noisy digitally compressed ambient drone with a laughing whore.

you can d/l the files at http://www.vstk.org/music/9weeks

About the source

i ripped it from a crappy overcompressed porn video in which the guy filming was interviewing the slut. I grabbed it for 3 reasons: the ambient drone in the background, the sound of the slut laughing, and the slut saying “i like to fuck, what can i say?”

the first iteration was quick and dirty. threw it into granulizer and scrubbed it for 60 seconds. Added a couple effects and called it a day. All in all i was done in 10 minutes.

The second iteration focused on seeing what i could do with resequencing. I threw it into Recycle and ended up with 2 major components: A bank of individual slices (about 80) and a soundfont which contained all of the sliced mapped out to note values. i spent about 45 minutes getting heady over oddball rhythm sequences. nothing new, but it was a nice revisit of some familiar rhythm techniques.

For the third iteration I kept the same tempo but instead of raw sequencing, I had 2 intentions. One was to try to use a combination of envelopes and filters to create a really nice ‘kick’, ’snare’ and ‘hi hat’ sound. The other goal was to utilize chaotic sequencing (randomize function) to produce a wide array of spectral and rhythmic content with the flick of a wrist.

I quickly tired of the chaotic element, but i was happy with the results of my sound shaping approach, so for number 4 i wanted to continue on this path. i slowed down the tempo to open up some space and focused on creating some more refined percussive sounds. i kept the kick drum as the only artifact from the previous experiment.

Iteration 5: tiring of highly controlled rhythmic experiments i went back to the first approach: straight granular scrubbing, expect this time i had the intent of creating more of an ambient drone texture.

Iteration 6: i know i’m starting to get a little bit ahead of the actual weeks, but hey, i felt inspired to try something new. This experiment was a proof of concept in creating pure (i.e. pleasant) tones that can be used for harmony and melody. For this I went into my favorite audio editor, cool edit pro, and zoomed down to the sample level and looked for places where there were anywhere between 2-8 oscillations of a wave that didn’t have too much variance. i used a freqency analyzer to see which one had interesting harmonic overtones when looped. i then exported these (i had about 12 microloops in total) and inserted them in sampler channels within fruityloops, using the loop feature. I then played them like regular keybaord patches. once i had made the microloops the rest of the creation process took just a few minutes.

average time spent on each iteration: 30 minutes. I plan on spending more time on the last 4 rounds, as i really begin to delve deep into the frequency components of my material and spend more time coaxing completely different sounds out of the source. I could have spent more time on these first tries to get a more polished and actualized sound, but i ultimately said ‘fuck it, i have real songs to work on!’

Sferics (short for “atmospherics”) are impulsive signals emitted by lightning which can be picked up within 1000 miles of a VLF receiver. My first stab at reproducing this phenomenon involved using SPEAR to resynthesize the audio sample, and pulling out certain frequency bands. It was possible to grab several bands at a time (beginning with frequencies between 50-100Hz), and then timestretch and pitch shift them in different directions. Taking these as a base, I then revised this process further in SPEAR, sometimes copying and pasting the strongest frequencies represented in the stream to blank space in the file to later be spliced in Recycle.

What I’m finding most difficult is to get the non-rhytmical timing of the lightning bursts. I’d like to explore trying to reproduce the actual storm that produced this sferic sample. At this point, this 60 second section shows a more elaborate intensification and teasing out of the original fequencies, and lacks some of the original grittiness of the NASA sample.