9weeks

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.”

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.