fold
A reworking of recordings I made back in summer 2002/2003 – and I think I might rework them some more as well – moving from raw recordings to heavily processed – although I still like to retain strong links back to the original space ie ground the work.
This piece is actually quite synthetic – 4 hours were recorded 6 hours apart – morning, midday, evening and night. Each hour was filtered, sometimes heavily in the case of removing the cicadas (way too dominating – they are a force in themselves), then split into 6 ten minute parts, layered, and finally sequenced from morning through to night to create a fiction of our yard in Brisbane during the summer of 2002/2003
peripheral
I was initially reluctant to take on this project as the original piece is more than enough in itself. But I also wanted to take part in another Junto. So I did, but gave my work a title appropriate to it’s ‘contribution’.
Primarily a spectral manipulation of the original stems provided by wildUP – a chamber ensemble from the USA http://wildup.la/ – of their performance of Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony, Op. 110a, I wanted to retain the mood and much else of the original. Here’s a screen shot of the spectral structure.
ensemble
A new work derived from the recordings I made of a house being built across the road from us back in 2005.
I recorded every Tuesday at about 10:00 am for an hour, using my minidisc – a great little recorder – and a cheap binaural mic setup – mics attached to a plastic lunchbox normally. The builders were aware of what I was doing – I asked their permission – and were quit keen. They wanted me to record on site, but I was particularly interested in recording from across the road. In Brisbane where, at that time, people rebuilt their houses as often as money allowed – the suburbs were filled with the sound of renovations, building, and complaints about the noise. I wanted to capture that noise – the one that neighbours get.
ICAD 2004 EEG Sonification
Made using C-Sound with Excel as the front end. A submission for ICAD 2004, accepted and played at the Sydney Opera House – which was quite a blast. The project was to sonifiy the brain activity of someone listening to an (unknown to us) piece of music The sounds my method produced actually mirrors some of the original piece ! Here’s a discussion that mentions this. It always amazed me no-one in my academic circles thought that much of my finding – I thought it pretty speccy really. http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/allinthemind/listening-to-the-mind-listening/3411082
from the paper: Sonification of the generalised mutual information was undertaken to reveal functional coupling between cortical regions for all possible paired combinations of 26 electrodes recorded during a 5 minute listening experience. Sounds were used to indicate the statistical significance of functional coupling for each time point – measured in 100 msec windows – of every electrode. The sonification reveals that there are many moments within the listening experience where no statistically significant relationship between electrodes is apparent. Nonetheless many time points do show significance and there are particular moments where widespread and highly significant functional coupling is revealed through the method.
disquiet 000…009 campfire with wimpy guitar
For the current disquiet project I wanted to make the guitar particularly wimpy and progress through a series of stages toward the original recording. I tend to hand work the timefrequency spectrum – I should learn some of the computational tools that I enjoy from other people’s work, but I find it hard to give up the tried and tested… and I really do like how my method gives me the opportunity for close listening. I’m happy with generative methods – been using them since the 70s, but I like those for conceptual or organisational aspects of the work – I still like to give the perceptual stream a lot of listening and hand tweaking. Anyway, here is the a screenshot of the time frequency spectrum of the wimpy guitar track, holes and all 
music by brute force
I quite like ‘brute force’ methods over computational methods sometimes – but I think I’m about due to update my coding skills and change. Anyways AllDaySleep on Disquiet Junto asked about my last piece so I though I’d show what I did (in the laziest way possible as finishing the potting shed beckons)
Two methods both of which work with the original sound Marc gave us – carving the time-frequency spectrum and narrow band construction of sounds.
Here’s pic of the time-frequency spectrum of the waves recording – the sound is the bright bits and the black holes are where I’ve carved sound away. Note that time is running left to right and frequency from low(bottom of pic) to high(top of pic)
You can see I’ve cut out quite a bit. Then I assembled very narrow slices to make ‘chords’, although more like harmonic structures than trad chords. I just use the selection tool to isolate a narrow band across the whole file and then paste that to a new file – select another frequency and merge that with the first one, etc etc. And of course you can carve into that as well
finally I mix those two techniques together – actually I mix a few examples of each of those, but the effect could be created on a single file if you wanted to work that way – which I must try sometime. I imagine it would end up a different result , I tend to think work methods are important, and ‘most efficient’ or ‘quickest’ is not necessarily better in terms of pleasure or result. This way has me listening with a fair bit of concentration to detail – but a quicker way to generate the ‘chordal’ files to listen to would be better so I am investigating that. Here’s a combination of the two techniques
another disquiet piece
A new disquiet piece this might be my last one for a while – semester getting even closer and I want to work on some other pieces – in particular the Lullaby piece for piano. Been a great inspiration for me