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SAD003 – Ode to Tropical Skiing 1:32 1.8MB
This is a text-to-speech rendering of John Forbes‘ wonderful poem, Ode to Tropical Skiing, which I understand was John Watermann‘s favourite poem. I made this as an intro to a performance at a lovely night called ‘Warm Words, Music and Dirigibles‘, as I knew that the audience would be appreciative. That’s the only time I’ve used it, so I think it’s OK to include here.
To make it, I used a program called Vox Machina and one of the built-in Mac voices (‘Alex’) and did a lot of tweaking of punctuation to modify the rhythm and cadence. I’m not entirely happy with the result, though, so I’d love to get some suggestions of better speech synthesis tools.
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SAD002 – Fuck Right Off 0:24 963Kb
Some of my earliest sound experiments involved grabbing bits of dialogue, music and sound effects from television using my trusty VHS recorder and creating collages of these sounds via pause button cassette edits on a ‘ghetto blaster’.
For the first few years of Wake Up and Listen, Adrian Bertram and I would each prepare a cassette full of such collages for every broadcast. We called these our ‘samples’. Even after we bought actual samplers, we still kept making cassette collages for a few more years, as they had a unique sound.
SAD002 is the sort of ‘sample’ that could well have been on one of those old collages. It’s a grab from the 1999 Trailer Park Boys film, in which the character of Patrick Lewis (played by Patrick Roach, who went on to play Randy in the TV series) makes a strong statement about his lifestyle. A good ‘sample’ is texturally interesting and has an element of surprise. This has those.
Instead of a simple VHS to cassette dub, the process of making this file involved noting the timecode of the desired sample using Google Docs, importing the audio from the entire video file using Wave Editor, selecting the sample, then exporting it.
Btw, I’ve decided to change the format of these sounds to 320k MP3s as a compromise between quality and accessibility.
After my performance at Don’t Look Gallery in October, in which I remixed a bunch of older works, I felt that it was time to focus on making new sounds for a while. I decided to make a sound a day, but soon got busy and fell out of the routine. I mentioned this to Nat Bates when we caught up recently and it turned out that he’d had a similar idea. He suggested that we should each make and share a sound a day. He’s already started.
So for at least the next few weeks I will be uploading a new sound here every day. Which begs the question, what do I mean by a ‘sound’? Generally they will be the sorts of sounds that go into my recordings and performances, such as field recordings, synths and media samples, sometimes heavily processed. I hope to share some technical and aesthetic ideas along the way. You’re welcome to use these sounds – please share the results.
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SAD001 – Splinter Loop 1:31 3.7MB 84BPM 32 Bars
These days when performing with the Splinter Orchestra, I use my Korg MS-20 Synthesizer, with a number of accessories, including an iPhone, a Korg mini-KP Kaoss Pad, and an Edirol R-09 recorder. You can see my setup in the photo above. The Edirol is used to pick up sounds from the group and use them as triggers or modulation sources for the synth. A by-product of this is that I have many hours of recordings of Splinter Orchestra performances and rehearsals.
SAD001 is made from a brief moment of a Splinter Orchestra recording session at the ABC in September. It’s just the shuffle and thud of instruments as microphones were being set up and levels checked. I used Wave Editor to select the sound, then Ableton Live to warp the events into a rhythmic loop. Both the ‘Beats’ and ‘Re-pitch’ Warp Modes in Live gave pleasing results, so I made a clip of each version, then sequenced them randomly, using Follow Actions. Some compression was applied to fatten it up, along with EQ to reduce hiss and rumble.
By the way, the Splinter Orchestra will be performing this Monday at the NOW now festival program launch at Serial Space.
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