#17

This contains a recording of a stream: “Stream, Water, C.wav” by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org.

The stream is granularly distorted and played alongside a tune and percussion mangled through several chains of plugins including ring modulation, VocalSynth2, AudioThing Speaker and Valves, amongst others, plus bandpass filtered to allow only “telephone” frequencies and set to mono.

I had intended to base the on-hold music on pitch-to-MIDI of the babbling stream recording but that proved even more unmusical than the end result.

Of course if I was going for realism, the track would be well over 40 minutes long. You have been spared!

Amusingly, I probably spent more time modeling the cover art, for this one, than the composition/processing.

6 Likes
#18

I just made an 808 loop, played a bit of annoying synth and guitar over that… looped it, increasingly bit crushed it over the length of the song. I always get more and more annoyed as I’m on hold.
As I was posting I noticed wasabicube was using the same title… great minds, etc.

9 Likes
#19

While setting up some basic stuff for this Junto, I was listening again to Yonderboi, after about two decades not having heard the albums I loved to play in the 90s. Then I started to just play in Ableton, first making a drum track along with just random selections of drum samples, added a chord line with a Vox, getting a bit of the old-school vibe. Ran it all through reverb, an Oberheim filter with modulation and some smearing echo on top, slightly modulated as well.

3 Likes
#20

Made with @Elisa-room237 - short and sweet (a bit too short actually because it doesn’t have a satisfying melodic ending :expressionless:)

But this was good fun to make. We both like vaporwave - so were happy to give making some muzak a go. Elisa played the keyboard, we both played the bass using Arturia Pigments (both because my timing was awful for the first couple of bars… so she took over). Pad sound and strings from OP-1

The words are inspired a terrible looking business book we found on the streets of Amsterdam called “Strategy of the Dolphin”.

7 Likes
#21

I started by playing some hold music on the piano (which you might recognise). This is the core element but I went for a slightly different angle to just processing. In particular I made something that feels like you are on hold. All the elements are samples, some of me, some of items and some of synths.

The recording and arrangement was all done on the MPC. The only synth used was the bass station 2. The hold music recorded from my digital piano and was from one of my books of lead sheets. All the acoustic recording was done on an SM58. Overall my approach was quite simple but I found the end result quite fun. It also contains a reference which some may find amusing. Another enjoyable week!

EDIT: FYI I contemplated making it 20 minutes long but decided against it as it might drive everyone mad.

3 Likes
#22

Eurorack modular drums, Juno 60 bass & lead, Processing in Audacity

I forgot I was recording, and the keyboarding is not great, but overall I like it and feel like it could work in a horror movie soundtrack.

I did many layers of distortion, filters, and a few other things in audacity.

Simple drums in Eurorack, Juno 60 Bass and lead all in one take.

3 Likes
#23

A track from my father (you can hear it on my soundcloud page as well - it is called “Mario Manili - La pioggia”) which I used to hear him singing a lot and it has the same effect of songs I hear on the phone while waiting, that is a little bit relaxing but annoying at the same time.

I processed the track in Paulstretch and had fun with some reverb, delay and other effects in Ableton live. I probably should’ve pushed the freeze button more and make it less ambient, but that’s it I guess

1 Like
#24

I had some extra time on my hands this weekend, so I jumped on this week’s project. I started by creating a Vaporwave backing track, then jammed a lead with a sampled Fender Rhodes Mk V. I made four copies of the lead and shifted the time on each one slightly, put a Hysteresis plugin on a return track, and then threw a crazy delay on the Master.

Enjoy!

3 Likes
#25

Absolutely love the ending! :joy:

2 Likes
#26


This is real muzak, rather generated than composed, and intended to evoke the unnerving quality of all hold music.
Generated in Ableton live with Glitch and Wash pack’s Technical Glitch Kit and Dr Chaos with Pink House Blues plus Tweezy Tape effect.
This is a loop.

2 Likes
#27

sorry wrong track: https://soundcloud.com/user-317443894/hold-noise-disquiet-424

1 Like
#28

Hey All, I had originally started out working on a track for the Stones Throw Beat Battle but when I heard the Hank Williams track as one of the samples I thought it would be great for a hold song. So using chops and midi conversion I added tracks and synths to it and then slowed it down. I ad-libed some lines to get the feel of those voices that come on and tell you to keep waiting. It is kinda funny. It is as if some company’s want you to hang up because the sound quality is so bad.

Peace, Hugh

1 Like
#29

I slightly modified the assignment (read: I misunderstood it at first and did something different) to portray how even a more-or–less okay piece of music can be degraded and subverted by being used as aural mogadon by a call centre, especially if you’ve been listening for 40 minutes and your ears are bleeding.

2 Likes
#30

Exactly! It amused me to see them both turn up in my SoundCloud feed consecutively :grinning:

3 Likes
#31

Great prompt. I created a beat that reminded me of those insta-rhythms that keyboards had when I was a kid, played a harmonic organ bit over top of it, and then I did whatever I could to degrade and defile it. For the tune, I thought how polynesian hold music would be imagined by a Music on Hold writer who had never been to, read of, or even given a shit about that part of the world aside from the tropical drink recipes they could provide.

2 Likes
#32

This is what it’s like to be in my head when I’m on hold with [pick a bureaucracy or corporate entity].

I’m old enough to remember the sounds of modems. Now they show up in nostalgic clickbait and the dang kids can’t identify the angular screeching. Joke’s on them, when I was your age I used to have to dial long distance to download the shareware version of Quake from a BBS.

So, the title, DTMF. Dual-tone multi-frequency signaling (DTMF) is a telecommunication signaling system used by telephone systems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-tone_multi-frequency_signaling

Each tone is a superimposition of two sine waves; for example, 5 is 1336 Hz and 770 Hz. I experimented with generating my own tones, but that frankly was a pain. It worked, but given the timeline I’d rather do something more efficient. Instead, I found recordings of all the DTMF keypad frequencies. I loaded them into Kontakt along with some historical modem handshakes. Feel free to download the resulting NKI

Gear

  • Cockos REAPER v6.03/x64 (recording)
  • Blue Yeti USB Microphone
  • Magix SOUND FORGE Audio Studio Pro 12.6 (mastering)
  • Native Instruments KOMPLETE KONTROL S61 (input)

Instruments

  • Native Instruments Kontakt 6 - DTMF (Null Confluence) - custom
    • Glitchmachines Fracture - II_HAARP
    • Native Instruments Replika - Wormhole
  • (My Voice)
    • Cockos ExpressFX Noise Gate - Custom preset to suppress toddler in the other room
    • Glitchmachines Hysteresis - IL_DaedDub
  • Arturia Solina V2 - Warm Blanket
  • (Master)
    • Reaktor 6 - VHS_1.12 - 1980s Pawn Shop
    • Cockos ReaEQ - Custom present

Attribution

3 Likes
#33

Snap. Glad you’re being honest about this - the joke is on us!! I remember waiting patiently for over an hour to download a 20mb audience recording of a Secret Chiefs 3 track. Oh the memories…

4 Likes
#34

Last week I had the opportunity to record the hold music for SadCo while it was suffering from a midi-based DDoS attack.

Summary

Sick kids this week so everything was via the iPad. This was made using a combination of @junklight’s Autony and Cality apps. Cality does a lot of stuff but especially neat is it’s “cloud” section which (according to the description) is granular synthesis, but for midi notes. Here I had it sending a randomly modulated clouds of looping 1/256th notes across a couple octaves to AudioDamage’s Continua synth. Most synth apps will sound very unmusical (to me), but Continua can hang. The cloud of midi notes is what is producing a lot of the crunchy white noise.

I recorded a bunch of this, and then chopped a bit of it and re-played it back in AUM verrry slowly and sent through a bunch of compressors, filters, and limiters, including Bark Filter which has a pre-set called “Telephone” and does pretty much exactly what you expect it to.

2 Likes
#35

Didn’t have a ton of time this weekend but this was a quick cheesy sounding track put together in Gadget.

1 Like
#36

Track was marked up and filtered using Logic Pro X. Wav was then chopped, slowed down, sped up, and timbre adjusted using a granular-ish technique in Supercollider.

1 Like