Author Archives: Charles

A Way It’s All Mangled

[play]A Way Its All Mangled (2015)

If you like this piece, please consider donating to Shelter, a charity that deals with homelessness in the UK.

This piece uses both the British and American melodies for Away in a Manger. I found a hymn-foccussed website that had both versions, which was especially good as both were in the same tempo and key, with all the same presets, so the files were already very closely related.

Then I forked wslib, which has some nice SuperCollider classes for reading MIDI files, but the method that outputs arrays for use in patterns was kind of broken, so I made some changed there. Then I wrote a quantising function and made lists of all the unique note, duration pairs (or chord duration pairs) in both pieces. A lot of the same pairs appeared in both. I gave each pair an ID, so that each song could be expressed as a list of IDs

I used the lists of IDs to generate Markov chains. Then I just kept asking for the next one for two minutes and ended a minor chord.

The sound synthesis is based on Nick Collins’s demo of how to synthesize a soprano. I added an envelope to add some unvoiced transients at the start of every note, plus panning, etc.

This track is part of a larger project, ’12 days of Crimbo’, which will raise funds for homeless and/or LGBT charities.

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I Love Christmas

I Love Christmas (2015)

If you enjoy this piece, please consider making a donation to the Refugee Council. We are in the midst of the largest refugee crisis since WWII. Refugees need our support in staying housed, clothed and fed.

this pieces uses more or less the same structure as a previous piece, Music for Panic Attacks, however, the synthesised timbres are seasonal for the holidays. It uses FM tubular bells, STKShaker Sleighbells and a Karplus Strong harp.

The voice is Donald Trump from two different occasions, talking about how, as president, he will pass a law mandating that all shops in the US wish patrons ‘Merry Christmas’, instead of ‘Happy Holidays.’ He doesn’t mention what will happen to shops owned by religious minorities,but let’s not dwell on that.

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Dronesleeves

Dronesleeves (2015)

If you enjoy this piece, please consider making a donation to the Refugee Council. We are in the midst of the largest refugee crisis since WWII. Refugees need our support in staying housed, clothed and fed.

In my home country, the song ‘What Child is This’ uses the melody from Greensleeves, which was not written by Henry VII. I picked it because it is not in a major key.

This piece was made with SuperCollider. I downloaded a MIDI version of What Child is This and used SimpleMidiFile class in the wslib quark to read the file at the leisurely pace of 4.5 BPM. The synthesis is a Risset Bell with some added subharmonics and sinusoidal envelopes. There were thousands of SinOscs playing at once as this recorded.

This track is part of a larger project, ’12 days of Crimbo’, which will raise funds for homeless and/or LGBT charities.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:03 — 31.6MB)

Little Dubstep Boy

[play]Little Dubstep Boy (2015)

If you enjoy this piece, please consider making a donation to Stonewall Housing (click the donate button in the upper-right corner). This is a charity that works helping LGBT people get housed and stay housed. They do a lot of good work, especially with LGBT youth, who still get thrown out of their family homes disturbingly often and sometimes also have trouble accessing shelters. Stonewall Housing has worked with trans people since its inception and is aware of and responsive to the needs of trans people who need housing. They deserve your support, if you are able.

This piece was created using MCLD‘s dubstep patch with the BBCut Library in SuperCollider, as described in an old blog post. It was modified slightly from that version so that \dub instrument’s triggers come from a bus and so that it steps through the melody of Little Drummer Boy instead of picking notes semi-randomly.

This track is part of a larger project, ’12 days of Crimbo’, which will raise funds for homeless and/or LGBT charities.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 2:00 — 2.7MB)

Jingle Hell

Jingle Hell (2015). This piece was created using a version of ixiLang that was made (barely) to run with SuperCollider 3.6 on some arrays representing melody, chords and drums for Jingle Bells.

It is available to download via Bandcamp, in exchange for a donation to Crisis, a UK charity working with homeless people.

This particular track is part of a larger album, No Room 2015 and also a larger personal project ’12 days of Crimbo’, which will raise funds for homeless and/or LGBT charities.

CCR76 (1969 / 2015)

[play]Shorts #36: CCR76 (1969 / 2015)

A realisation of Nature Study Notes CCR76 by Cornelius Cardew, commissioned by Stefan Szczelkun.

Nature Study Notes is a collection of 152 different rites, or short text ‘scores’, used by the Scratch Orchestra as a spring board for improvisation. CCR76’s text says, ‘It’s not music. It’s my heart beating.’

For this, piece, I started with the most obvious cue. I downloaded a sample of a heartbeat from Freesound and recorded my coffee grinder, which I felt alluded to a rapid heart rate. Both of these sounds appear with no modification, but the heartbeat sound is also used for amplitude modulation and ring modulation of a FM sweep I coded in SuperCollider. The piece was assembled in Ardour.

This piece was used in the Scratch Orchestra Nature Study Notes performance at Cafe Oto in London on 22 February, 2015. As Stefan only had one speaker, the piece is in mono.

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Live at the Hundred Years Gallery (2015)

[play]Live at the Hundred Years Gallery (2015)

This is a live set I played at the Hundred Years Gallery in Hoxton, London in February. Originally, it was going to be a 2 hours set broadcast live on the radio, but this is what it became. This was live-patched, using my MOTM analogue modular synthesiser.

Live patching is a way of performing live, where I go on with a bunch of patch cables around my neck and nothing plugged into the synth. I get sounds going as quick as I can and then change them over the course of performing. For this particular performance, I started with FM chaos. This is good, because it gives a lot of potential variety, however, if I had actually been on for the entire two hours, it would not be all that well-suited to slowly evolving drones.

All the sound here is analogue, but the panning and recording is handled by a program running in SuperCollider.

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:45 — 27.1MB)

Shorts #35: Radioactive Wellness (2014)

[play]Shorts #35: Radioactive Wellness (2014)

Commissioned and titled by Chrissie Caulfield.

Chrissie asked me to write something with a radiation theme for her friend, who is having radiotherapy for cancer. I looked into getting a geiger counter, and even found who might lend me one, when I realised I would need a radioactive element in my studio. Also, as I was thinking of what to do with the clicks, I realised I wanted to use them for triggers, so I would need a geiger counter with a line out and everything seemed to be getting overly complex. In the end, I realised chaotic or stochastic noise would sound the same as the effect I wanted, which much less of a chance of accidentally gaining super powers (that’s what happens when you mishandle a radioactive element in your studio / workshop, right?).

In the end, I made this with my MOTM modular synthesiser. The final recipient was reportedly very happy with it.

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Shorts #34: Bubbles (2014)

[play]Shorts #34: Bubbles (2014)

Commissioned and titled by Sonia Elks.

Sonia asked me to write an analogue piece that wasn’t glitchy. Very often, I work with FM chaos as a way of controlling pitch and timbre. However, for this piece, I used FM chaos for control voltages only, and not directly for sound. One of the oscillators was controlling pitch of the source signal, one was controlling a high pass filter and one was controlling a low pass filter. For some of the tracks, the filter resonances were turned up very high, so the filters were ringing and acting like oscillators.

This piece seemed a bit poppy, so to further that, I put some compression on the sounds and also a bit of reverb. The source material was from my MOTM synthesiser, edited in ardour and had the final fx applied in audacity.

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

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Shorts #33: Birthday Music for Caroline (2014)

[play]Shorts #33: Birthday Music for Caroline (2014)

Commissioned in honour of Caroline’s birthday – “Happy Birthday, love from Lauren and Alistair”

This was a digital piece using a very large number of scripts. First I wrote a SuperCollider script to generate some stochastic sounds. Then I wrote a script to convert audio files into bmp graphics files. Then I wrote a script to convert those files to jpegs, glitch the jpegs and convert back to audio. Then I also did several revisions of drawing more and more on the images in GIMP to transform them. I ended up with several batch processing scripts to glitch audio using visual data processing. I’ve put some of them on github and the rest will go after I fix some bugs I found after finishing this piece.

After generating loads of material, I listened to it and assembled it as a collage in Ardour.

The images are also kind of interesting! 2.aiff.au.bmp.jpg.gl

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:00 — 1.4MB)