#56

Ah, if you can share a “how to” if you get it working, would be great.

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#57

ill do!
but the tick is to get it working first haha

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#58

Pleased to see this thread! Very relevant to my interests in listening and sound-making, along with the general Erstwhile / EAI etc. area. For those curious I would absolutely recommend combing through the Amplify2020 collection: all the pieces are new and free to listen / download, and it encompasses so many amazing artists, veterans and up-and-comers alike. (there’s also me, for whatever that’s worth… https://amplify2020.bandcamp.com/album/music-from-box-file )

For myself, I think texture is mainly what I listen for in music / sound, and what I’m interested in making: I don’t have the inclination (or ability!) to make beat-based or melody-based material. It can be very interesting trying to persuade gear that’s designed and sold as e.g. a drum machine to behave in more abstract ways. One reason that I enjoy lines is that there seems to be more discussion and interest in more abstract / textural approaches to sound, compared to plenty of forums where more or less everyone is making house or techno.

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#59

That’s the one. Thanks.

Tangentially, the idea of listening to the format more than whatever was printed on the format is an interesting idea. Maybe. Or maybe just whatever’s present around the sound you ‘want’ or expect. I was using a Brüel & Kjær Random Sinewave Generator the other day in a studio setting, and of course it just has to produce a sinewave, but I found myself equally (if not more) interested in the noise and texture around the sine that the machine produced. The sine was a bit impure and with some mixing desk EQing I could get a nice texture framing the tone. 've often thought about similar scenarios where I’d want to notch out the actual tone of a recording and just listen to what goes on around the tone. Plenty of interesting things to discover.

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#60

This label mappa editions has some releases that might fall into the topic

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#61

Thanks for this thread!

I’ve already posted Haptic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2J3jJXNBK7k

Abeyance is an interesting composition. It shows how a field recording can have a deep, strong effect, even though it only contains recordings of empty rooms.

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#62

Back after a short break, this time with some samples!

I had a bit of a “creative barf” over the last five days since the finding of a treasure trove of old Hindustani and “just Indian” classical music and field recording tapes. Someone left a whole basket of mostly home recorded tapes at a local thrift store, some untitled and others labeled “Bombay1992” ect. I spent the last days as splicing through them as much as i could, and have recorded aprox. 3 hours worth of material. I collected the best of this massive amount here, but it’s mostly regular sample based music.

I did however use the texture of one of the analog tapes as basis for This track, which demonstrates the use of my modular setup. The W/ is looping a sample which I achieved by trying the no input mixer technique, and then slowing it down to -x2 speed. This makes fundamental loop of the piece and gives it a grounded depth build upon. The Morphagene is fead with the texture of the tape, and then modulated by marbles which quickly modulates length and position. Morph is set roughly at 13 o’clock, making the stereo panning but without pitch. This is the second/microsecond layer of the piece, being just on the bring of granulation. Lastly Monsoon has very short a vocal sample from a tape in its buffer, being modulated by O_c for pitch and trigger. This is the final granular layer to my piece, having 3 different microsound scales incorporated and having micro amplified source material. So i think this qualifies as lowercase?

I have some more recordings i will share in the future, but for now its what i can offer composition wise :slight_smile:

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#63

probably not what youre referring to, but there is a mike shiflett album that reminds me of this. Merciless i think is the name

#64

I do like the approach of removing the ‘content’ of a sound and seeing what’s left behind. Seth Cooke does something sort of similar with his ‘No-Input Field Recording’, which involves making recordings with nothing plugged into the recorder, so what we hear is the empty channels and inner noise of the equipment. There’s a surprising amount of textural variety in the results: some is harsh whiteish noise, some is like minimal synth, some is very sparse and EAI-ish. All at least conceptually relevant though: this material is 100% textural impurities!

Here is a collection of these. I have the physical edition, which is a: “2GB micro SD card encased in a 4cm x 4cm x 4cm silicone moulded black concrete cube, painted with Stuart Semple’s Black 2.0. The micro SD is highly unlikely to work and cannot be recovered without destroying the cube”. It’s a good cube.

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#65

some of you may be interested in a “new” recording that richard chartier and i are releasing today:

it is a studio edit of an 8 channel installation we did at ICC Tokyo way back in 2003. richard had some recordings from the space and send me a bunch of individual tracks… i worked them up into this hour+ version and richard has put it up on bandcamp.

it definitely reminds me of this now-distant time… it’s a very very mellow piece and i think sounds quite nice. since you had to be in tokyo during its run to ever hear it, most people haven’t had the chance.

we hope you enjoy!

  • taylor
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#66

i think this might be more dub than lowercase, but i think it’s still relevant to the style. i’ve been thinking about when trying to push boundaries of sound design and create new textured sounds, the minimal approaches seem to work best. and i get the best organic results with friction by making contact between two objects and recording the resulting impact, slide, slap, scrape or rubbing sound. but then i think of jan jelinek or philip jeck and how they capture these extremely subtle fragments. like the ghost of a click or a small ping. and im trying to come up with some methods for how to either synthesize those types of sounds or capture & edit them. this is a good example i think::

it sounds like vinyl scratches/dust maybe? but low pass filtered and maybe pitched or stretched down? sort of tape-sounding also. i think it may be more in the processing. i do get close when i take some type of filter ping(or series of them), or something with a lot of transients but not a lot of tonal information, then loop that into particles with nebulae and bp filter that. and i dont know if its some crazy compositional technique, some sort of compression method, or what. but when i try to sample the resulting sound, it is almost impossible to get the right piece of that audio clip, or even if i think i did, to then make it fit in either a pattern or a mix.

it might help to study dub. because i really dont know the specific tropes and history of that genre. or any techno oriented genre, for that matter. but im more interested in the textural ambient design aspects of that sound anyway. so maybe there is something there that would help to understand it in context. i do like the overall muted sort of dub sound.

have you ever tried to capture just the very edge of a sound? like not the impact, but a short snippet like someone smacking their lips while eating and gasping in air, or turning the page of a book; but you dont want to use that entire sound. so you attempt to crop out just the intermediate(in-between)/liminal, (what’s the word im looking for here____?) part of it. like capturing dust. then without really smearing it, placing it alongside other small fragments of fragments or layering them together.

anyway, i apologize for the rant. like most of my posts, i imagine this was probably better left unarticulated inside my head. but if you know how pole made that sound, i could probably use that information. not that i want to adopt anyone else’s technique. but i think that being aware of useful workarounds can help get the gears moving and spark further exploration

i originally heard the sound in this, but he’s mostly talking about mastering here from what i caught of it

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#67

According to multiple sources the clicks and hiss come from a broken filter. One of these sources: https://www.factmag.com/2009/01/01/interview-pole/

For these types of sounds i tend to start with extreme close-ups of friction/rustling various material, then use a properly edited take to make a granular texture, with some slightly resonant highpass (with usually f > 2000 Hz). So basically a variation of your own described process. In the making of the granular texture i tend to use ways that allow some kind of regular timing (Cosmosf and Cecilia to not name those). Also i tend to use very short time constants/sharp enveloppes for grains as to get more clicks in the process.

As for the other question, yes, the minimal air background “ghostly resonating” from any onset event is a territory i like to explore.

Mostly i think it is a process of selecting through large amounts of material.
Imho any (clicky trail) gesture can be “rhythmically correct” if used as a timed/restarted loop in conjunction with other layers providing clues about a global tempo.

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#68

ah, i guess i didn’t research it hard enough. nice find

meticulously sifting through large amounts of experimental noodling or heavily post-processed field recordings and stitching micro-fragments together is definitely a strategy i use in ableton. when translating or reconfiguring a similar practice in hardware, it’s a little harder to do with ram and hard drive memory limitations

i thought i had explored almost all there was in the realm of software granular synthesis but i haven’t used either of those. thanks for the recc. cosmosf looks very similar to crusher-x

i guess software is going to be the best way to achieve these sorts of sounds. although i do wonder if something like the little deformer or the tastychips gr-1 can zoom into to a sample with ultra high definition and subtly dissect and modify little pieces, rather than use them as a drone synth voice or turn them into reverb clouds. most of these hardware versions of grain samplers seem like iterations of Clouds. i am also a fan of the sharper edges envelopes. i use the trapezoid version much more often than gaussian

it is difficult sometimes to try and stay away from reverb or delay when searching for those sounds. i do like to experiment with placing them in different positions in a binaural field and sometimes doppler panning. but i would rather not blur them too much. i think an alternative to that is maybe using resonators and frequency shifters, maybe very light phasing or chorus to achieve ghostly effects. then vocoding and saturation/bitcrushing can help give an edge to otherwise weak transients.

i think one of the things i’ve been struggling with more recently is figuring out whether its my sound source that’s unusable or the processing. i do find it hard to capture sources that work well for this specific quality. vinyl crackle does seem like a good one, but i guess sifting through heavily modulated synthesized material comes in handy there. i wonder if maybe using a spectral editor like iZotope iris 2 would be good for magnifying a source like electromagnetic static. or if the opposite approach, removing most of the source is the better route. the best way to find out probably is just lots of experimentation

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#69

You certainly won’t get reverb clouds stuff out of a little deformer. I’ve been concentrating on my NLC system for the last month or so and have hardly touched the LD3 at all. But I love using it to process live audio and, if you’re interested, I could put together some kind of demonstration. In any case I’ve been inspired by this good thread to try out some live manipulation of recorded material, which in my case will be Uzi pro recordings of cockroaches or jrf contact mic recordings of tarantula silk.

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#70

A new book/audio release from Steve Roden:

I haven’t read the book yet, only listened to the audio part. Recommended.

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#71

if you find the time, i’d love to see a demonstration. sorry I’m just now seeing this for some reason.

i know i’ve watched videos on it before but for some reason i couldn’t get a good idea of what it does as far as granular synthesis from the ones i have seen

also very interested in hearing the cockroach and silk contact mic stuff if you’ve uploaded that anywhere. sounds amazing

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#72

As soon as I saw the title, I guessed there’d be a mention of Ed Ruscha somewhere.

#73

Right. I’ve recorded demos of several of LD3’s discrete granular effects, using a single sample (tarantula silk) in each case. However, not wishing to derail this thread, I’ll put it in the dedicated Gotharman thread. Working on it now.

#74

Sharing this older text as it’s relevant:

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#75

[…] given the notion of affect as posited by Deleuze and Guattari, sound-itself may be understood as being always already real. Thus, sonic actualization — contrary to its common meaning — entails the contextual, qualitative exteriorization of sonic interiority. Performance, then, may be understood as the site-specific fulfillment of the process of actualization.

A complicated but nice sentence. I read is as a way to approach all sounds as already existing and the performance of a composition as tapping into a sound or tone. This is a nice and comforting approach. It feels similar to tasting: The taste is there already and is actuated by the performance! I don’t like wearing headphones unless I have to and I often listen to music from the crappy speaker of my mobilephone. I think this suits lowercase/onkyokei/extreme-minimal stuff well. The distortions and space ambient make the music even thinner. The sounds are seeping from the small holes my device and counterbalanced by remote plumbing etc. noise. It sparks curiosity: Did an artist really conceive what I’m hearing? Thanks for sharing the article.

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