My nine-year-old nephew and I built this pyramid out of scrap paper and tape. It was really fun. I want to round up 15 people and build a gigantor one in an art space. He wants to go around to mall stores and try and sell it. Maybe we’ll do both.
A few months ago, I picked up a copy of The Computer Music Tutorial, by Curtis Rhodes. It got me thinking more deeply about sound than I ever have, and got me really curious about just how the hell sound works anyway, what the stuff is. One big concept in the book is the idea that anything that processes a signal is a filter, and there is no fine line between different kinds of filters. I admint, I don’t get this 100%, but to me it seems like another way to think of it is that you can make a huge amount of effects (any effect?) by imagining a room with certain properties. Most people know that reverb and delay are meant to give the illusion of being inside a space. They are models of what would happen to sound in a real space. So, if you, say, play a note on an instrument, what you actually hear is what happens after the sound leaves your instrument, and bounces around the room for a while.
Things start to get really interesting for me when I think about the fact that the room might give you back tones that weren’t in your original sound. In the examples below, I first play a high-pitched bleeph noise, and then send it through a reverb effect I built in SuperCollider. The reverb is just a bank of delays with random lengths, approximating what happens when sound bounces around a room. At first, it sounds like normal reverb. But then, as I adjust the lenghts of the delays, making them closer together, so instead of a scattering of sound, we get a quick, regular repetition, tones begin to emerge that weren’t there to begin with. The reverb is actually generating a tone that’s lower than the sound that’s being fed into the reverb. This begins to feel to me like the virtual room I’ve built is a very simple musical instrument. If we could change the position of the walls quickly (which you can hear me simulate in my computer representation) then we’d have a real instruement, capable of generating a range of pitches.
Here’s the dry signal:
And the wet signal, where the simple beep noise gets transformed, using nothing more than delays into a fairly nasty bass sound.
So, therefore, I proclaim that sound effects and sound sources are not such different things as they appear to be.
I’ve had a nice couple days of re-visiting EQ, being reminded of how powerful it is, and being shown how fundamentally important it is for making music that feels big, enveloping, properly seasoned and delicious.
Take a listen to the before and after here. This isn’t something I’m all that good at, so the before and after isn’t as dramatic as it could be, but to my ears, the after sounds much better.
Before:
After:
If you’re a music-maker (and Ableton Live user) and would like to see/hear what I’m talking about, download this Ableton Live project. It contains a short drum loop with some EQ I’ve applied. If you think you can do better (and quite likely you can), please let me hear!
I did this in headphones (don’t have any speakes here in Berlin yet), which is probably a very bad thing to do.
I’ll be here showing off Ripple, doing SuperCollider programming (probably working on integration with my newly soldered, un-boxed Monome), and hanging out.
My wife and I are planning on living in Berlin October through December. It’ll be a nice way to get closer to some of the music I’ve been most excited about lately, a nice way to simplify my life and carve out more time for creativity, a nice base from which to travel to other cities and perform (hint! hint!). I’m looking forward to it.
Here’s a track that probably won’t be on it, but almost might be.
Josh has a nice HD recording setup at his house now. We’ve been jamming and recording some. Josh is planning on releasing a DVD with jams made by him and all his music friends he invites over. Good idea josh!
The folks at SoundScaping are featturing a recent live set of mine (recorded “live” in my apartment, actually). I think it’s pretty good. You can judge for yourselves. Listen here.
Also, check out the first release on SoundScaping records. Some very lovely stuff by Christophe Bailleau.
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