Author Archives: Charles

Shorts: #8 svp

[play] Shorts: #8 svp (2007)

Titled and commissioned by Gino Robair

This was made in the BEA 5 lab of Sonology at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, the Netherlands. It’s made with VOSIM controlled by a sequencer and being run through a third octave filter, which is some crazy custom, antique european thing. Man, that filter sounds good. They’re on ebay once in a great while. I want one, but I’m too lazy to do the custom modding myself. It’s Danish, made by Brüel & Kjaer in Copenhagen, Band Pass Filter Set Type 1612. The interface is really modded at school.

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Shorts: #5 Yes, But I Don’t Know When

[play] Shorts: #5 Yes, But I Don’t Know When (2007)

Titled and commissioned by Nicole Wilkins.

This uses 4 Oscillators, an LFO, a Sub-Octave Multiplexer and a SAH from my MOTM. It’s kind of a nifty patch where the main, sound producing osc is soft-synched to a very FMed osc. For most of the tracks, the pitch is additionally controlled by using the SAH in the 1/V octave input of the main osc. The clock for the SAH is from the pulse output of the third osc, which is FM controlled by the main osc. The random output of the SAH is setting the pulse width of the third osc. This makes the clock very skittery at times, which is nice. The sound from the main osc is going to the SOM to pick some extra bass and from there is going to a Sherman Filter Bank.

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Short Attention Span: #4 Radioactive

[play] Short Attention Span: #4 Radioactive (2007)

This short piece was made with sounds generated in the BEA 5 lab in Sonology at the Royal Conservatory of the Netherlands in The Hague. There were mixed with a remote-controlled macmini running Ardour and Audacity. My lab partners Dave and Tomer most likely contributed to the source sounds.

My Odeo Channel (odeo/27a00b78afe378f5)

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Short Attention Span: #3 Sproing

[play] Short Attention Span: #3 Sproing (2007)

Continuing to embrace rather than fight my short attention span, here is the third one in the series.

This one was made with a MOTM analog synthesizer controlling a Sherman filter bank. The source sounds where ticks of white noise modulated with some FM sounds.

I would not characterize the filter bank as “intuitive.” I decided not to get one years ago, but then I went to a show a few weeks ago and was so blown away by somebody using one, that it caused me to change my mind. The learning curve is steep, though. They could really use a better manual and the diagrams of signal paths stencilled to the outside are very incomplete.

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Short Attention Span: #2 Glitch

[play] Short Attention Span: #2 Glitch (2007)

Continuing to embrace rather than fight my short attention span, here is the second one in the series.

The sounds were generated in the BEA 5 lab in Sonology at the Royal Conservatory of the Netherlands in The Hague. There were mixed with a remote-controlled macmini running Ardour and Audacity. My lab partners Dave and Tomer most likely contributed to the source sounds.

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Short Attention Span: #1 Buildup

[play] Short Attention Span: #1 Buildup (2007)

Rather than fight my short attention span, I’ve decided to embrace it and do a series of really short works. This is the first in the series.

The sounds were recorded in the massive analog synthesizer in BEA 5 in Sonology, in the Royal Conservatory, in The Hague, the Netherlands. The mixing was done with Ardour running on a macmini, but displaying remotely on my laptop with X windows. I can’t recall the patches used for the sounds, except that they involved a 200 kilo plate reverb. Tomer may have contributed to this.

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Music for Panic Attacks

[play] Music for Panic Attacks (2006)

Over the summer, I was having problems with anxiety. I noticed that sometimes, if I exposed myself to stressful sounds, they would sometimes leave me feeling relaxed at the end, rather than more agitated. I set out to make something that would stress me into relaxation in this fashion. In stead I came up with this. During the summer, every time I heard it worked on it, it would reliably give me a panic attack. I played it on stage only once in August 2006 at the Luggage Store Gallery. It gave me a mild panic attack. I’ve decided not to play it again.

Other people note that it does not stress them out, so I seem to have found the magical combination to give myself (and nobody else) a panic attack.

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