Nick Seaver: Fergie Study #8 (video)

From the archives, this video is actually a class project I made last year.

The audio is a shortened version of one of my Pop Studies, which is made from a sample of the intro to “Glamorous” by Fergie. I took that sample, pitched it around and layered it, and then listened to what happened when I used Ableton Live’s time-stretching feature in extremes. Time-stretching is supposed to allow you to change the speed of a sample without affecting the pitch, but beyond small changes, it introduces interesting artifacts.

Since the original sample has no strong beat, I wanted to see how the perceived tempo would change as these artifacts piled up. The distinct beat/melody heard around 2:55 in the video is just the result of time-stretching artifacts.

The video is a one-second sample from the official music video, looped and cut up using Jitter in a patch I put together. Little production side note: because I couldn’t install Jitter on the class computer I used to make this, I had to create a freestanding patch that altered the video based on data in a text file. In class, I just edited the text file to make edits to the video. Here is the whole text file, just for kicks:

0, shift clear;
1, shift 1 2 1;
39, shift 1 2 0 2 1 1;
79, shift 2 1 0 3 3 1;
119, shift 3 3 0 0 0 1;
159, shift 0 0 0 2 4 1;
200, shift 2 1 1 3 3 1 0 0 1 2 4 1 1 2 1;
260, dim 90 60 loop 2;

400, 0;
480, 0;
720, 0;
1200, 0;
1380, 0;
1870, 0;
2000, 0;
2220, 0;
2340, 0;
2550, 0;