Technically I guess were supposed to use only the sounds provided…oops.
Anyway, this gave me a great chance to work on something I’ve been thinking about for a long time - using the tonal information “hidden” in soundscape recordings to create a tonal framework.
I took each provided sample and listened closely for the tonal hidden content, trying to match the background sound to a pitch. Sometimes I used Ableton’s Spectrum plug-in, but often I used my ear.
From there, I tried to make an Ableton instrumented that would “play” these soundscape recordings from a MIDI keyboard. At first I tried to use “zones” in the Sampler plug-in, but halfway through I realized it would be faster to use an Instrument Rack, filtering the notes to trigger a given sample using the Notes plug-in. This worked well, even if it was a little hard on my processor.
I wrote a simple theme that felt satisfying and made use of the “subliminal” tonal content of the samples. Then I improvised, intending to find ideas that worked and rewriting them into a piece, but I ended up just keeping the improvisation fairly intact. The only modifications I made were transposing certain sections to match the pitch contour of the theme, editing out it out some of the “junk notes” I played, and fixing some bad timing (gotta love working with MIDI!)
The keyboard sound is from a processed version of my upright piano and the Rhodes is from a Live Pack by Leonard Charles, which is amazing quality and everyone should get it.