Vibrations and how they get to your ears.
Noise for airports is a blog about culture, sound, music, and technology.
You can filter the posts to see just things I wrote or made.
Updated (sometimes) by Nick Seaver.
Nick Seaver: Rihanna Study #2
This is another of my Pop Studies.
It’s definitely the most simple of them, and maybe one of the most successful. It’s just “Umbrella” sped up a little and played backwards. I’m not sure if the simplicity/success thing says more about the merits of simplicity or the limits of my compositional abilities…
In any case, I think it came out sounding gorgeous—still recognizably Rihanna’s voice, but in some alien language. I probably listen to this more often than the original track now.
Enjoy!
edit: not sure why the beginning of this got lopped off and replaced with a few seconds of silence, but just pretend it fades in nicely. Ah, isn’t that better?
Nick Seaver: Britney Study #5
Another Pop Study.
For this one, I was playing around with masses of sound—what happens if you play the same song 25 times at once? Britney Spears’ “Gimme More” provided the opportunity, and I provided song over and over, staggered and spread around the stereo field, layering and layering.
I imagined that this might have been the soundtrack inside her head back in her crazy days. (Yeah, more old pop material! This is the hazard with using contemporary source materials, I guess.)
Nick Seaver: Ciara Study #13
This is one of the Pop Studies I worked on a few years ago. I was playing around with compositional strategies based on work by various 20th century composers and my digitally-enabled capabilities.
This piece is based on a short sample from the song “Other Chicks” by Ciara, off of Goodies. I played around with loops of it, transposing them and phasing them against each other. This is one of the resulting recordings of essentially improvised loop-playing. It’s not perfect, but hey, that’s why I can call them “Studies,” right?
