My HW2 composition is a slow-moving & textural application of comb filters, pitch shifting, sample slowdown, and distortion. I recorded a lot of sounds around my apartment as a part of the process, but eventually settled on using only on sound made using a couple techniques. The first is sounds made by stabbing a bouncy ball with a knife to make a superball mallet:
I rubbed the mallet along a variety of surfaces such as mirrors, my big metal dehydrator, and my shower to get these sustained, kind of metallic-y sounds. These sounds ended up having pretty unusual harmonics which really helped keep the texture moving constantly.
Next I used the sounds of me hitting some plastic squeeze bottle with a chopstick:
This adds a bit of rhythm to the outro. The was some light arranging done in a daw (essentially 3 chunks were output and put together with a bit of mixing), otherwise this was done through ChucK.
Superballs, dehydrators, plastic bottles and comb filters.
I'm keeping the project hosted at this github repo.
The main sounds that I'm planning on using are percussive sounds by hitting things around my apartment with chopstick, such as:
and using a superball stuck to the end of a knife to make a superball mallet to make neat sustained sounds.
My current experiments (found here) involve playing around with random triggerings of my superball samples at different densities. I randomly pitch shift set the playback rate of the samples so that the sounds are bassier. Additionally, I try to get some variation in the playback itself by randomly flipping the direction of the playback during the course of the playback (i.e. play the sound file forwards or reversed).