Today I had the pleasure of participating in the GET RHYTHM! event at the Powerhouse Museum, with Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky & Annie K. Kwon, Andrew Johnston & Ben Marks and Jon Drummond. I gave a presentation about the Sound a Day project, as well as Alias Frequencies and Memory Flows. The drinks afterwards were full of interesting conversation.
Sound a Day will be taking a break over the holiday period. I had hoped to continue it, but I’m moving house and will be without a studio and possibly internet over the next few weeks. Once things have settled down I’ll be back with more sounds.
Have a great new year!
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SAD013 – Chamber of Secrets 0:17 700 KB
The photo above is of the toilet at Jinnah’s.
The sound is of a toilet flushing, played backwards and slowed down, which is a technique often worth trying. The dynamics were enhanced with volume graphing in Wave Editor. I also got some interesting drones from the same recording which I might post later.
Chamber of Secrets could work well in an electroacoustic or musique concrète piece.
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SAD012 – Jinnah’s 0:56 2.15 MB
Jinnah’s is a crazy Pakistani restaurant in Dulwich Hill. Going there is always an adventure, but I wasn’t prepared for what greeted us when we arrived tonight.
SAD012 is a recording of the entrance at Jinnah’s. I made it using FiRe on my iPhone. I don’t know why the sound is so strange – possibly a faulty radio transmitter? Staff walked past apparently without noticing! I just wish there’d been a strobe light to go with it.
Btw, the (rather expensive) food was great when we last ate there about a year ago, but tonight was very disappointing. The food tasted old, the restaurant was empty and they’d replaced the previously warm lighting with a few cold white CFLs. This was sort of a farewell as we’re moving away from the area, but we won’t be missing Jinnah’s as much as we thought we would.
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Sound a Day 011 – Korg Study 002 0:08 312 KB
One thing I like about the MS-20 is that you pick up where you left off. There’s no saving and recalling patches. Today’s sound is based on yesterday’s patch, but the input signal has been removed. The repeating notes are played by hand. The built-in ‘modulation generator’ or LFO is set to a descending sawtooth wave, influencing the oscillators and filters, while some envelope modulation gives the notes more presence.
A fairly simple sound, SAD011 could be used as either a one-off effect or a loop. It could also be good slowed down &/or backwards. I might play around with it some more…
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Sound a Day 010 – Korg Study 001 0:25 998 KB
For several years I’ve had the idea of doing a collection of ‘Korg Studies’ – short pieces that explore a particular sound or technique on the Korg MS-20 synth (and also the Korg mini-KP Kaoss Pad). Here is as good a place as any to start.
KS001 demonstrates my usual technique of using an external input to drive the control voltages. In this case it’s a random song playing on my iPhone. There are two square wave oscillators an octave apart, their pitches mapped to the mod wheel. One is modulated by the amplitude and the other by the frequency of the incoming signal. The low-pass filter is also being heavily modulated. When the incoming sound hits a certain level it triggers the envelope generators, which have a percussive shape. Continuous tweaking of parameters is done to shape the sound into something interesting.
These are techniques that I’ve developed and refined over the past few years of working with the Splinter Orchestra. I was also very impressed by Asmus Tietchens‘ performance at Liquid Architecture this year, and I think his approach to the synthesiser may have influenced me recently.
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SAD009 – Alternative Comedy 3:16 7.49 MB 90 BPM
Another Numerology piece. The voice is actually SAD003 played on Numerology’s built-in sampler, with lots of modulation going on. Strangely it sounds less like a computer and more like a real voice than before. The drums remind me of standup comedy, so I imagine this piece as a very odd comedy gig. I should add some audience sound fx, maybe the one I removed from SAD007. Anyway, some random piano, split into two tracks, rounds out the sound, adding some melodic interest and stereo movement.
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SAD006 – TV Scrub 6:06 14.04MB
For several years my studio and lounge were the same room. The TV would be on most of the time, with the sound going through the computer, allowing me to process or capture it. It was often subjected to spectral/delay/FSU plugins for extended periods. TV’s more fun that way.
For today’s sound I decided to process some TV audio in a slightly different way, without plugins. I recorded a minute each of 11 different TV channels and brought them into Ableton Live as a series of loops. Follow actions in legato mode switch to the next clip every quarter note, so it’s effectively in 11/4 time.
Structurally it’s quite simple, going from 999 BPM down to 20, then back up to 999 again. The result is a kind of basic wavetable or granular synthesis. I’m annoyed that Live can’t loop clips without putting them in Warp mode, but the ‘Beats’ setting resulted in some interesting buffer effects.
I have to admit to having a thing for cutup and processed voices. They tickle my brain in ways that other sounds don’t. I’m sure there’ll be more of them in this series.
Nauru Elegies: a portrait in sound and hypsographic architecture
by Annie K. Kwon and Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky)
Exhibition Dates | 19 December 2009 – 30 January 2010
Launch Date | Saturday 19 December 2009 @ 2pm | GET RHYTHM! Performances and Talks by Paul D. Miller and Annie K. Kwon with guests Andrew Johnston, Ben Marks, Jon Drummond, and Shannon O’Neill | Target Theatre | Level 2 | Powerhouse Museum, Sydney | RSVP ESSENTIAL to deborah@newmediacuration.com
Guest Curator | Deborah Turnbull | New Media Curation
Design Realisation | Interaction Consortium | Dr. Greg Turner | Aram Dulyan
As advertised in Museums & Galleries NSW and Ampersand Magazine
Available Publication: Rhythm Science, by Paul D. Miller (MIT Press, 2004)
PRESS RELEASE
I’ll be talking about my use of the web in recent sound works, including drawing from the Pool for Memory Flows, my new ‘Sound a Day’ project, and developments at Alias Frequencies. If there’s time, I may also do a short laptop performance.
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SAD005 – Cistern Crash 1:30 3.46MB
Recording storms is one of the most obvious things to do with a portable audio recorder – I’ve recorded plenty with my Edirol R-09. Listening back to a 30 minute recording that I’d made of an incredibly loud downpour outside my bathroom window, I noticed a section in the middle where the rain stops, and one can hear the sound of a cistern, then a loud thunderclap. It’s that moment that I’ve selected for today’s sound. A cistern? Well yes, I had just used the toilet. Cisterns can make amazing sounds – people should listen to them more closely.
Cistern Crash is best heard on headphones.
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SAD004 – Collapso 4:07 9.9MB 120BPM
Numerology is a program that should be much better known. Imagine Ableton Live in which the emphasis on audio looping is replaced by step sequencing and generative composition. I love its extensive modulation and randomisation options which encourage experimentation.
Collapso is a minimal, ever-changing rhythm. It’s made of just a kick, hi-hat, and the ‘SynthTom’ patch on the LinPlug Free Alpha synth plugin. The tom has a short melodic sequence in Mixolydian mode, but the parameters of the sequence, including note probability and octave, are being continually modulated – you can see it running in the screenshot above. The hi-hats also have some randomisation, while the relatively simple kick helps give it momentum, emphasising the syncopation and bounciness of the tom.
I could listen to this do its thing all day, but should probably try to turn it into a finished track, with a few more sounds.
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