#14

“What distinguishes a particular engineering discipline from another is only the palette of things to be put together,” says structural engineer Mark. E. Eberhart in his book Why Things Break. The same might be said for how things are broken apart.

Human beings are compelled to be destructive; otherwise, we simply don’t evolve. Our survival quite literally depends upon our capacity to wreck stuff. Destruction is a fundamental component of construction, for without the ability to sculpt raw matter into tools we have no means by which to build. Destruction is evidence that we have successfully moved forward as a species.

For this exercise, Suss Müsik approached the concept of destruction as both starting point and continuum. A simple counterpoint sequence for fake strings and piano was duplicated and distressed, using heavy distortion filters and run aggressively through a pitch-shift modulator.

The resulting artifacts form what you hear at the beginning of the piece. From there it was simply a matter of reversing the “destruction,” which seemed weirdly self-referential: could the act of destroying the destroyer be considered, by reverse logic, a form of construction? Suss Müsik will leave that for you to ponder.

The piece is titled Entropy and was recorded live to 8-track. The image is refracted sunlight dissipating through a glass of water on a white table.

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#15

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#16

hello, friends/strangers. I couldn’t help but participate this time, because if there’s one thing for which I have a visceral love, that is definitely destruction :slight_smile:

I’m afraid I must admit, though, that my destructive process wasn’t spectacularly creative. I just took a very mellow synth string sound, and added effect over effect. it probably conveys the tortured sound concept, but could definitely be more complicated than that. oh well.

around this sound, I built a slow and repetitive ballad type of thing, with the enthusiastic participation of a bass, some synthetic drum (more of a quirky percussive sound really), and a massive gong sample by Omachronic from freesound.org, to set the overall mood.

how I destroyed the sound, in order of appearance/disappearance:

  1. distortion times 2 (foldback + overdrive)
  2. trifecta of modulation (flanger + chorus + phaser)
  3. slightly subdued bitcrusher
  4. slightly overdriven octaver
  5. in the final/initial phase, a leslie effect + a layered delayed chiptune sound

in the central section (1:40-2:00) you can hear the pristine sound without any effect. everything was done in Caustic, a mobile app, with minimal post-mixing in Ardour. thanks again, and enjoy :slight_smile:

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#17

I like recording short snatches of radio from my Fieldkit and so I used one for this week’s project. The brief asked for a tortured sound so I performed a variety of mashing, slowing and speeding up, saturating and reverbing until the string sample became a screaming dirty wall of noise. The track starts with the end result and then morphs into the original sample. The audio degradation then proceeds in the order the processes were applied with the resulting wavs overlapping a little to give a sense of continuity.

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#18

My torturted sound is a guitar sample of Sarah Longfield included with the Polyend Tracker. I also used her single shot drum samples from the same set.

Destruction is by means of bit depth limiting, as well as heavy side-chain compression on the Tracker’s master limiter. All in all this results in surprisingly pleasant grainy noise.

As prescribed, the sample gets decreasingly distorted as we go, ending with an almost clean version at the end.

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#19

I sat down to make music with the intention of finding a way to express my emotions at the moment (this is the second in my “Therapy Sessions” series), and I was confronted with a wall of mental noise, presented to me by all the music technology at my disposal. While I struggled to find my heart, my mind was busy thinking about technology and technique. After a bit of discussion with @okeryon and @Hawthorn, decided to run with that as the concept for the piece. This is the result.

I decided to also take inspiration from #disquiet0460 and start with a tortured, complicated sound (evocative of the mental “noise” that comes from using music tech for expression) and transitions to the starting point, then returns to the chaos.

I started with a simple arpeggio on a nylon guitar (which I later changed to a synth sound). Added a Bitwig Micro-pitch device set to an obscure Wilson scale, and added a send track with Output Portal (granulated pitch transformations in this case) & Thermal (more glitchy feedback fx) on it. Added automation to start with Micro-pitch wet, FX send volume, and global tempo set very high, decrescendo, and then re-crescendo, over the course of the track.

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#20

Hello, here is my contribution:

Process:
started with a simple repeating organ melody using DSK B3x plugin. faded in my favorite granular effect machine Argotlunar and played with granularization parameters to destroy the sound. Next in the effects chain is a distortion plugin followed by a convolution reverb using a techno loop instead of an impulse response and faded both of them slowly in. voila, you end up at a metal concert with a jet crossing after you got sucked down an ocean vortex.
it was fun!
maybe the end noise is not that complex, but I feel it has a cleansing effect

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#21

I started with some more or less innocuous drone sounds in Bram Bos’ Mononoke driven by his Collider. Then a put Cality ( a midi processor) in between Collider and piped that through Minilogue XD, a Skulpt, and Axon) The I used several LFOs to more or less randomly modify the parameters of the apps while playing a bassline on the Moog sub37. This all came about because I have been thinking a lot about the karma that has all of us living in a hellworld.

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#22

https://soundcloud.com/ohm-research/naprej-disquiet0460
As I continue to attempt to negotiate my way around the Furthrrrr Generator and the Clouds parasite…

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#23

Entropical Paradox

Follow along as I deconstruct and then reconstruct a chaotic tortured sound from a simple 6-note melody. I made my tortured sound with a modular synthesizer according to the following procedure:

  1. Create a short sequence repeating a simple 6-note melody with a triangle wave oscillator through a filter and plucky envelope
  2. Layer a sine wave oscillator with plucky envelope playing the same melody, detuned a few semitones from the first
  3. Layer a third wavetable oscillator (E352 in cloud+morph mode) playing a steady pitch
  4. Add four øchd unsynchronized triangle wave LFO modulations to the wavetable oscillator to morph between the waveforms and bend the pitch over several octaves
  5. Add Mimeophon (a delay processor) set to a low zone and low number of repeats
  6. Increase the number of Mimeophon repeats to about 12 o’clock
  7. Increase the Mimeophon zone to maximum
  8. Add Desmodus Versio (a reverb processor) to increase echo and feedback
  9. Wait for chaos to ensue
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#24

I took the first violin part from the first section of Fratres by Arvo Part and fed it to Mangrove, modulating formant and barrel, filtered by Three Sisters, modulating quality, scan and frequency, with reverb by OTO Bam.

Then I reversed it
Then I slowed it down
Then I duplicated it on another track
Then I added some compression
Then I added distortion
Then I added tremolo
Then I added a filter sweep
Then I added more reverb
Then I added a summed tremolo
Then I added a summed, modulated filter
Then I added more reverb

I got the order wrong in introducing it back. I would not use this for anything, but it was fun to do.

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#25

Drum track with ARP2600 VST arp being gradually mangled by plugins from Wavesfactory (Echo Cat), Sinevibes (Sequential and Flow II), Soundtoys (Decapitator), Eventide (Blackhole) and Softube (Saturator). Valhalla Room initially used for ambiance but is faded out as the destruction progresses.

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#26

A tortured textural sandwich with a grains filling get’s uplifted by some strummed SK-1 before falling back to the dark side. Hope your all doing well :slight_smile:

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#27

Some people don’t like getting wet in the rain, which I guess for some might be seen as toture. I like it. I used a recording I made in a forest while it was pouring down and totured it with some processing. What you hear is mostly drops on tress, leaves and my jacket. I wanted to keep it simple, but then I started making sends and sidechains and that made it a bit complicated, but I liked how the rain started sounding like stormy 8bit bombs :slight_smile:

I used three duplicate tracks containing the forest rain recording (tracked and mixed in REAPER):

  • Track 1: Processed with Unflitered Audio’s Fault and modulated freguency shifts, feedback and pan. Split that into a highpassed send which sidechained a compressor on Track 2, creating a squashed pumping effect.
  • Track 2: Started the process chain with Raum reverb getting squashed by the sidechain compressor feeding into some distortion and then into a highpassed EQ with a modulated cut-off.
  • Submix: Bussed Track 1+2 into a bus compressor and another instance of UA’s Fault doing some heavy duty frequency shifting, pan modulation and bit crushing. Things started to get violent and sweepy - which I like. I split that into a send feeding a distorted Raum reverb and using the same processing as on Track 1. This glued everything into a single violently moving sound.
  • Track 3: Clean recording of the forest rain.

Progression: Full mix, gradually removing Submix reverb send processing, gradually removing submix processing; Track 1+2 submix fading into a soloed Track 1; fading into the unprocessed Track 3. From there everything is introduced in reverse order.

I know pretty boring description, but it was fun to do and solved the assignment :blush:

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#28

Nice evolution, sounds like a wet and totured sandwhich, did you create the bubbly straw blowing sounds with the synth? It creates a great space ::

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#29

Recently came into possession of a Microfreak. Also, somehow I was listening to a lot of Primus again, after not having listened to them for something like 10 years (or maybe more). I began by recording little loops of different sounds from the MF that I liked, then started mangling them, adding reverb, blending them together, finally adding distortion. One of the loops turned out to be this slightly-swinging bass line that afterwards I realized may have been filtered through from a bit of Les Claypool (but less quirky). The track starts with the chaos, then let’s each part fall away, then builds it back up. I ended it by keeping a few loops that I thought went well together.

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#30

Great and captivating track man, sounds like the listener is being lead through perpetual construction and destruction (in a cool way)

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#31

It sounds like holding pure destruction in the grasp of your hand. Very well done.

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#32

All destruction is done by VSTs. I started with a generic pad to have some beauty to destroy, it sets in around 00:50. Then I lost some control in the DAW (as I froze a lot of tracks but deleted some, I lost the completeness of the history).

I think it’s Synthtrack to create rythm, Voxengo Tempo Delay to complex it up. Glitchmachines Cryogen to get some ugly destruction. Lagrange for some crying. Caelum Tape Cassette and Izotope Vinyl to simulate vintage destruction. I paralleled the last part with an instance of Morris’ dronemaker on the sound of this part and an instance with Full Bucket Phaseshifter. Or so.

Yes, I’m not that convinced, too…

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#33

Since I have quite a bit of torturedness on my soundcloud, and I often write music starting at the end and working toward the beginning several bars at a time, I figured this would be straightforward, but it was difficult to steer this one. I kept track of everything I wrote over the weekend, including harmonizing an article title that popped into my head, but didn’t finish it until this morning after we got a call that my wife’s grandfather had passed at 97, after quite a tumultuous life.

Here’s an accounting of the evolution, based on track times:

  • 0:00 Monday morning: Ending recap
  • 0:18 Thursday 22 Oct: “Featuring text2speech dot org” and semi-random piano warmup (backward sample from 1:18)
  • 2:18 Friday night: Lyricless melody/harmony for “Brain waves detected in mini-brains grown in a dish” September 2019 article title
  • 3:10 Saturday morning: same thing after having evolved down a half step and slowed overnight
  • 3:45 Saturday afternoon: “Beginding” new melody that came out of wagneric sdrawkcab (sequenced backwards 4/8 bars at a time) with “Brain waves detected in mini-brains grown in a dish” text2speech.org samples, and starting out with (in the backward direction) “wagneric” t2s sample
  • 6:03 Sunday: Alexa device proxy and Piano duet with new melody (lyrics in my head related to wanting an Introverts Day on February 29th)
  • 6:20 Monday morning: Ending. RIP JLS (1923 - this morning at 0500 mdt).

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