I did three pieces, here on this playlist: https://soundcloud.com/neurogami/sets/disquiet0241-foreground-effect
The first piece I finished, “Beatings per Minute”, was a spillover from last week.
I was had been thinking about how a drone would morph into a more melodic piece, and while drifting off to sleep one night I realized that almost anything played fast enough sounds like a drone.
I use Renoise as my DAW. The BPM can be set as high as 999, so I planned on having a track start at 999 BPM, and then bring the beat down. At some point, as the BPM got closer to my target (134) I was going to fade in the other tracks.
As often happens I got wrapped up in how to make that work. I was able to map a MIDI rotary controller to the BPM parameter (and some other rotaries to track gain devices) but I wasn’t getting the transition curve I wanted. The deadline for that Junto came and went, but I did finally get some scripting in place that allowed for an exponential curve on the rotary mapping such that higher rotary values transitioned faster than lower values.
Along comes the next Junto, and I figure since I already have an effect (rapidly dropping BPM) I would use that. I generated some samples of a few notes and repeating motifs shifting in BPM, then used those to create “Beatings per Minute.”
(One of my causal “rules” about the Junto is to not get too hung up on things, try to work fast, follow some impulses, be kind of lazy and see where it leads. Then, if something looks interesting, I might develop it more some time in the future.)
Later, though, I felt that there was still too much emphasis on a deliberately musical (i.e. melodic) aspect. The effect was there but not front and center. I felt I had side-stepped the intent of the Junto.
Time for a second piece. This time I picked a simple effect: delay. I grabbed a voice sample and looped it over a simple beat. As the piece progressed I added more delay. There are four delay devices on the vocal track, and their send and feedback values increase over time. Thus “Echo Chamber - Dogs of War”
There’s a sort of Lucier “I am sitting in a room” vibe to it.
Of course, the presence of that beat, simple as it is (kick drum, and a high-hat with some phasing) again pushes the “foreground effect” more to a “mid-ground effect”. So I rendered that same track but without the percussion.
It’s a really simple piece, and it has me thinking about how to write a tool for Renoise that would automate the creation of such pieces. Provide a sample, select a single effects device, and have the tool generate the automation to increase effects as the song progresses. It’s not quite that simple in practice; I started adding compression devices to the effects chain in m piece because the cumulative delay was pushing the volume too high. A script-driven tool might need to do something similar.
Or not, and just let it get loud.
