Friday 4 February 2011

Sound-A-Day 04.02.2011

Finally Friday evening. Been a long week, still a bit sore about my speakers but what can you do, I guess these things happen. Gonna go looking for some new headphones tomorrow which will ease the pain I think, and then spend the rest of the weekend experimenting with sending OSC to Isadora, and taking a few more HDR, weather permitting, Should be fun!

In the mean time, here's the last sound of the week. Not quite sure where to being trying to explain this one... Started out as a bit of a mess around really. I built a kinda generative patch in Reaktor which responds to Frequency and amplitude of an input and controls the routing, and numerous parameters of a bunch of simple effect macros.

Next I gathered up a collection of metallic objects, springs, gardening tools, tea tray, a medium sized gamelan gong etc. I put these into a large sturdy box and put a condenser and a couple contact microphones in with them. I ran the mics through a small mixer and into Reaktor. Then, I beat the living crap out of them with a crowbar, and recorded the result.

It was... interesting, if somewhat distorted in places =D

I got about 5 mins worth and edited out the best bits, made them into a sample map and loaded that into Metaphysical Function, played about with that for about an hour, again recording the results before editing out the best bits. One sound in particular I really liked, had something that really reminded me of a Cylon from Battlestar Galactica. Like a Mechanoid idling noise. So I took that as the basis for developing the sound a bit further.

Loaded that along with a few more of the sounds into Logic and made a bit of a montage with them. I've also used a few recordings I made of a VHS loading mechanism, a DSLR auto focus, one of the coffee machines at work, an old flatbed scanner, and a broken HDD. Then just a couple subby sin waves to move the air a bit, and it's kinda done!

MECH-MONTAGE by Noisy Neighbour Sound

Really love making these montage type things, a nice way to give the sounds a bit more life and context. Might have to do this more in the future. The thing I find pretty difficult with them though, is keeping them arrhythmic, guess just turn the grid off and use the ears!

(Edit: again soundcloud is being weird and doing it's transcoding nonsense. Hope this one finishes uploading ok, will check back tomorrow)

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