Monthly Archives: November 2014

Shorts #31: 1416343620 (2014)

[play]Shorts #31: 1416343620 (2014)

Commissioned and titled by David Jensenius, who says the title is the unix timestamp of when he received the commission.

This is an acoustic piece, recorded with a zoom and mixed in Ardour. The source sounds are my radiator, my kettle boiling, shoving a running recorder into a plastic bag and finally feedback from when I accidentally told Ardour to do monitoring of the internal microphone to the internal speakers. The feedback timbre is modified by putting my thumbs over the speaker grates. This does not have as much subtlety as the kind of speaker cupping that PowerBooks UnPlugged does with macs and feedback, but it still works.

The plastic bag portion of the sound is influenced by the Fluxus composition Micro 1 by Takehisa Kosugi, “Wrap a live microphone with a very large sheet of paper. Make a tight bundle. Keep the microphone alive for another five minutes”. I highly encourage people to try that out, as it’s surprisingly wonderful.

If you would like to commission a one minute piece, check out my online shop.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:05 — 1.5MB)

Shorts #30: A lazy afternoon in the shade of the cliff (2014)

[play]Shorts #30: A lazy afternoon in the shade
of the cliff (2014)

Commissioned and titled by Dan Stowell.

This piece was created with a MOTM synthesiser and a Gravity Well fracRack module by Circuit Abbey. It was mixed in Ardour. It was my first use of the Gravity Well module, which does emulation of orbital paths. I need to read the help files a lot more to figure out exactly what is going on, but it seems to do wave shaping to emulate the position of satellites or other orbiting bodies. Appropriately enough, I was recording this during the comet landing, checking for updates between every track.

After mixing it, I did a final listen via only the internal speakers on my laptop and found that the last part was too low for the speakers to play any sound at all! In the mean time, I listened to the recording of the ‘singing comet’, and emulated it in a patch and put that over the second half.

If you would like to commission a one minute piece, check out my online shop.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:06 — 1.5MB)