Inspiration and Creation

I began by collecting sounds in very much the same way that Paul Lansky did – in a kitchen with a few children helping me bang on pots and pans and bowls and using hairbrushes and forks to scrape agains things with different textures. I was not at all interested, however, in keeping it too realistic, so I hunted through the samples and extracted bits of them that I could convert into a kick drum sound, click sound, etc.
The main goal was to experiment with swing. Many of the functions allow some sort of control over how much sixteenth notes swing, which allows for easy adjustment of the groove as the piece plays.
I used the code for KS-Chord from (https://ccrma.stanford.edu/courses/220b-winter-2015/ck/ks-chord.ck) to add in some harmonic interest in the second half of the piece.

Reading Response

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.” -- Marshall Moluhan In the movie “We Are Your Friends,” Zac Efron is an aspiring house music producer who finds a mentor in the music industry. The mentor’s main advice is to use sounds, even electronic dance music, that sound familiar, are recorded, ‘have soul.’ The protagonist then goes about recording everyday sounds such as his friend using a nail gun while installing shingles on a roof, Emily Ratajkowski singing with Autotune, and a Wurlitzer electric piano.

Not exactly Paul Lansky’s Homebrew materials, but I would like to discuss this in light of the reading: do recorded sounds have ‘soul’ or are they just more effective because of our association with them?

On page 188, there is a waveform of a recorded train. When a comb filter is applied, from a compositional standpoint, the sample now serves an additional harmonic purpose beyond signaling to the listener that they are hearing… a train.

So what about if we filter the crap out of the train sound so that it is nearly unrecognizable. Or such as in Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room,” the only semblance is a slight rhythmic similarity. Does the sound lose its soul? Can it be given a new one?

I posit that the amount a sound is changed from its original recognizable form has only to do with where the resulting sound falls along the ‘real’ – ‘fantastic’ spectrum and has no impact on the quality of the sound whatsoever, with the caveat that recognizable sounds do hold power to trigger memory and nostalgia instantly.

But there is no reason a completely synthetic sound can’t do the same. However, by necessity, this is impossible the first time it is heard.

Source code