I figure it might be kind of noisy in a typical spacecraft apartment–noise abatement = weight and cost. The apartment depicted here is in the cheap part of the spacecraft–buried deep in a warren of vents, pipes and driveshafts. But it’s cozy and the price is right!
The ambience here comes from:
–5 separate noise generators, each run through a low-pass filter featuring a different cutoff frequency and modulated at a different rate by a LFO. The high-frequency filters used fast modulation (up to 10 hz) while the lower ones were low (down to 0.001 hz!).
-a ‘struck bar’ generator (randomly chosen preset)
-a ‘shaker’ generator (randomly chosen preset)
-background sounds; I ran the microphone through a 10-second delay and reverb
except for the background sound (which is always on), everything is triggered at random for random lengths, with a bit of randomness in stereo panning, reverb and volume. The background sound is pretty random too; I stuck the laptop in the basement and went about doing housework and so on. My only interventions: at one point I played a Nixon speech on my phone, and then played “Also Sprach Zarathustra” by the Portsmouth Sinfonia (a wink to “2001” ).
I ran the main bit for 30 minutes but in principle it could run any arbitrary length (in the main loop in the code change “30::minute” to “1::week” or “1000::week” as you wish).
It gets quite loud at points and very soft at others. I didn’t do any post-processing; I don’t know how Ableton would deal with a file this length.
If I had world and time I’d probably think of some correlation structure for the noises (human behavior tends to be positively autocorrelated at short horizons, I suppose) and add some 60 cycle hum.
here’s the code:
