This week, it was suggested we explore the sonic properties of tinsel.
Funnily, there’s no parts of the holiday music canon which feature tinsel prominently. Had we been asked to think about chestnuts, snow, bells, reindeer, or more recently, you, last or even more recently LA, there might have been a cover in me. But I went to lyrics.com and looked and yup, there’s no tinsel songs.
But there are a lot of lyrics which contain the word tinsel. So I scraped the first and third page of the lyrics.com search for tinsel, extracted just the lines that were lyrics, jammed them together, fed them into the mac speech synthesizer with voice “Fiona” as a tribute to my collaborators with whom we have made Christmas music in a Scottish style, and thought “lets go”. And then I had two false starts. One of them I accidentally re-wrote another song, and another I accidentally wrote something I couldn’t execute and didn’t like.
But third time is a charm and in the end it clicked. Take the turnaround from a favorite Christmas song and record it differently on piano and bass, grab the generated wav file into python and do some silence detection kinda crappily (code all in my GitHub) and use that to generate midi which tracks the turnaround I was going to play, pull that midi into logic and do some modeling with the Surge FM and Vocoder stuff, and voila, music emerges.
This week’s bit is called “Patience My Tinsel Angel (disquiet0415)”. I hope you enjoy it and have a wonderful holiday!