#41

And also just enabling you to complete a process, rather than pushing you towards a particular style of sound.

I remember losing a load of time on this Lost Technology vst:
lost tech

I’ve got a now 20 year old computer that still runs XP with a digidesign Mbox that I often think of roping back in - just as an fx send…

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#42

Screenshot 2020-11-29 at 20.51.44
Screenshot 2020-11-29 at 20.51.441402×106 50.5 KB

:smiley: amazing. the anti-laptop-era-merzbow noise fans would explode

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#43

I used to do a (literally) down and dirty CD skip thing by burning a CD of whatever sample I wanted to mess with, lightly rub it against my hardwood floor, clean it with an alcohol wipe, then play it in a Sony Discman and run it into a sampler or my laptop.

If it was too badly scratched, it wouldn’t play. So you couldn’t go too heavy on the floor. And I tried the alleged writing on the CD with sharpie that I read somewhere that Oval supposedly did, but that never worked for me.

These days, I have a tweaked Max patch to add that sound if I want it.

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#44

I read years ago about an artist who discovered from DJing that some kind of mold (originally grown by accident from beer on a CD and later deliberately cultivated) would make it glitch in much more interesting ways than basic scratches, supposedly due to the very fine microscopic fractal-ish textures. But I never heard the results and can’t remember enough to re-find the article or artist, so I’ve no idea if it’s typical Sound Artists hyperbole/snake-oil for some fairly ordinary glitch music or not :smiley:

Either way i found a wet diskman in the sreet the other day, we dried it out and it works. Proudly claims to play Rewritable disks ! so should get into some CD abuse again / try to bend it

also remember the glory days on the Circuitbenders yahoo group where someone insisted that XDUGEF had faked his circuitbent diskman, resulting in weeks of flame war

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#45

Would some of the older Reaktor User Library patches count? I think some of the older ones on there are like 20 years old. I have no idea if those specific patches still work, but I do know a lot of older patches still work even in the newest version. Also if you don’t already have Reaktor it’s 50% off right now which is a great deal considering you get access to over a decade of user patches.

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#46

Currently, I think the biggest draws for me for using kinda archaic sound synthesis programs are the quality of the sound (usually lo-bit, kinda “harsh”) which comes ready made more or less, the clumsiness that comes with working with it (encourages happy accidents and surprises), and appeals to my personal drive to figure something out that appears obtuse at first.

I came into all this a little after the dawn of DAWs, VSTs, etc. so I don’t have a true deep history with it all. I used some of the early synthesis programs as they were cheap or easy to get copies of at the time (plus the older laptops). And, of couse, the sound appealed to my aesthetic sensibilities. A few drawbacks that echo your sentiments at the time were the requirement to know synthesis from a fairly solid mathematical understanding and the tedious workflows (when I used a copy of Sound Forge Acid on a friend’s computer I immediately started scheming on how I could get the $$ for that). Although it did make one a bit more rigorous in one’s approach.

#47

Been playing this on an emulated mac plus, really interesting but I think I’m gonna have to try a more recent emulated machine to really achieve anything, too slow/unreliable/limited on such an ancient machine

#48

Woah. Beer mold. Interesting! Although, not going to lie, I’m a bit skeptical. That would be a truly refined ear to pick that out in a mix. “Oh! That’s a mold skip!” “No no. Just a scratch.”

After messing around with disc skipping, I can understand how folks would probably call bs on any hardware hacks. A skipping CD is a skipping CD, whether by intention or accident. One really needs to play around with it a good deal to have any guess if its some form of in-the-box manipulation (usually sounds too repetitive and clean) or truly a hardware thing. And even then, if its a loop, tough call.

Best of luck with the CD find! Post some sounds if you get anything worthwhile.

#49

As far as I can tell most diskman bends actually bend the shock protection chip (basically some kind of digital delay) rather than any of the CD reading part. Also I think people have found ways to bypass the thing that mutes it while paused - it’s actually skipping/looping while in pause mode

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#50

Yeah. The models that were labeled for sports usually had a decent buffer size, maybe like 3-4 seconds or so. I can’t remember exactly. The first run of Sony that had the anti skip feature had a very short buffer size, maybe a second but probably less. I heard of folks getting interesting variety with different models.

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#51

Oh his Bandcamp is voluminous these days! Lots of very hefty releases, I think he’s been going through his archives.

#52

Gorgeous.

And here’s the blog post of the hacker with an overview.

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#53

My other piece of CD glitching received wisdom is that the very earliest CD players would doggedly try to play pretty much ANYTHING

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#54

They need to be used as plugins in the SoundEffects / SoundMaker software. I forget which is which but one was shareware the other a paid version. If these links don’t work try the Macintosh Garden or Repository.

http://www.riccisoft.com/soundeffects/

Something else I just remembered, Marcohack:

Using a SoundHack-style interface, sound files may be processed in a number of ways:
• The main feature of the program is a technique for separating an audio signal into something which is called a source or excitation signal and a resonance characteristic or filter. The excitation signal and resonance characteristic are saved to separate files; the excitation signal is saved as a normal audio file (AIFF) and the resonance characteristic is saved as a file format which can only be used by the program itself.
Within the program it is possible to recombine an excitation signal with any resonance characteristic of your choice in order to create ‘hybrid’ sounds which combine distinct properties of two different sounds into one. These ‘hybrid’ like sounds can have a very strong quality of their own.
Furthermore, the program features a series of techniques for processing the resonance characteristic itself, for example a technique which creates a crossfade between two resonance charcateristics.
• An improved technique for convolution which results in a better sound quality in comparison to normal straightforward convolution techniques.
• A technique for stretching sounds in an unfamiliar way which is described by Trevor Wishart in his book Audible Design (Orpheus the Pantomime 1994).
• Several techniques for altering the harmonics of a sound which are also described by Wishart, like stretching the spectrum in an unfamiliar way or thinning the number of harmonics in the spectrum.

5 Likes
#55

Thank you. Got SoundMaker working and got a hold of Michael Norris, who will kindly provide me with a license for the shareware effects.

MarcoHack sounds very interesting. Developed at the Institute of Sonology in the Hague as well, which is where I currently am.

1 Like
#56

Well, SoundMaker/Effects works, but after opening a 44.1khz 16bit sample of only 2-4 mbs, there’s not enough memory to do any processing at all. It just refuses. I have no other software running during this, so maybe I need to soup up the Powerbook. I can only imagine getting the parts for that must be a pain in the ass these days.

And MarcoHack just hangs at the start up screen and won’t progress beyond that, menus being greyed out and everything.

Edit: MarcoHack opened after a reboot. Stil runs out of memory in no time.

#57

Been messing with Metasynth since the Classic days, I think i used a demo back in the day. I remember finding some instant Aphex Twin sounds in the presets :smiley: In more recent years I actually bought the full software and have basically never used it :frowning: And now am waiting for an update so it works on the latest OSX

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#58

It certainly looks cumbersome, but I wonder if it makes any sense to go down the [OS9 on Raspberry Pi] (https://www.novaspirit.com/2017/04/13/running-mac-os-9-x-raspberry-pi/) route (via Sheepshaver) to get something somehow less bulky but not sure about the processing power.
Edit: comments on that link above are full with troubleshooting requests, so uh, no.

This is also why I think if apps were less GUI driven it would be great to get some elements into Norns.
I really love playing with @speakerdamage’s Uhf (norns).

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#59

Re: Michael Norris’ SoundMagic FX and Alberto Ricci’s SoundMaker/Effects software:

Okay. So I heard back from Norris regarding the password-locked shareware effects folder, but he couldn’t remember the password. I tried to put nothing in there, it give me an error, but still unzipped the folder. Not sure if the files are then corrupted or not. Added them to the SoundEffects folder does nothing, unfortunately. So I tried getting SoundMaker instead, but that requires, as pointed out earlier, a serial. Trying to get a serial for that right now, but I can only find an old email address pointing to Ricci, will try it out, but I doubt it’s still in use. The person seems to work for Apple now and is on Twitter, but does not allow messages.

If anyone has a serial for that, please let me know, I’d love to try it out.

#60
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