My first plan for this project was to dust off a method I had used before: playing the word in a sampler with the sample length initially very short so we only hear the first sound, and then increasing the length so we eventually hear the word (a technique I used here www.juanmariasolare.com/CD_Sn.html), but applying it to vowels and consonants. But it just didn’t work with such small snippets.
So I tried out an idea which had been on my backburner, which was to recreate Brian Eno’s use of tape loops on Music for Airports. Eno used long loops of different lengths. I chopped up the word “becoming” into 7 pieces and set each snippet to loop at its own piece. Eventually they would synchronize again. I didn’t feel mathy enough to calculate when that would happen, so I panned each snippet at a different place in the stereo field and listened for when the whole word appeared and shot across my ears in a linear fashion.
When that happened, I strengthened the reemergence of the word “becoming” by doubling it with the original audio sample. To keep it from being stale, I added a slow-moving auto-filter set to “notch” to slowly sweep up and down the frequency spectrum, so it sounds a little different each time.
I also used the reemergence of the word “becoming” to be the start and endpoints of extreme time-stretching of the word. These are panned hard left and right - one is Warped using Ableton’s “beat” setting, the other one uses “Complex Pro.”
At the end, these extreme-time stretched words are compressed back to something like the original length of the word. They sound different from the original, as they should!
Some other studio trickery happened - I added a slow-moving notch filter on every instance of the word “becoming” to make it sound a little different every time. I also put a kick and snare compressor on the phased word snippets to give them the timbre of a drum beat. The final tweak was to make them disappear for a bit: classic drop!
