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.
If you like glitchy sounds but fear glitchy electronics, Sidsonic has come to the rescue with a sample set of “5 GB of pure Circuit Bend Soundmaterial.”
All samplesets are fully playable with three velocity zones. Common problems for Circuit Bending like pitch and tone fluctuations got eliminated, without curbing the typical sound and the unique experience only Circuit Bending can deliver.
Furthermore, hassles like hung up or burnt-out gear and the lack of reproducibility are avoided by the concept of a Virtual Instrument, so that the Circus Circuit Bending Library makes it possible to comfortably use the one-of-a-kind sound of Circuit Bending within professional productions for the first time.
Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, played on soda bottles.
Similar to the Dirty Projectors’ gimmick, but a little less impressive. (But maybe more doable at home!)
(via oddstrument)
Some enterprising folks took samples off of the newly-deciphered Phonautogram recordings, making them into a free sample pack for software samplers.
If you don’t understand “Kontakt, EXS24, and SFZ formats,” there is still a little audio demo on the page that uses the sample pack.
(via the music of sound)
A good video because it both taught me things I didn’t know about the samples in “Smack My Bitch Up” and because it did that in a totally bizarre way.
(via the music of sound)
Nick Seaver: “Estefan on the Beach”
This is a cover I made of “Knee Play 1” from Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, using (almost) exclusively Gloria Estefan samples. The counting is, of course, from “1-2-3”, and the spoken word parts are from an interview with her I found on YouTube. (The only non-Estefan audio is the spoken-word counting in Spanish—I couldn’t find any clips of her saying numbers.)
Two little notes from production: There is no “eight” in the original Miami Sound Machine track without a beat behind it, so to make an acapella “eight,” I stitched together the “eh” from “seven” and the “eye” from “five.” It seems to work, especially with a little reverb to smudge everything around! Also, the spoken word, while different from the original “get some wind for the sailboat/these are the days my friends,” follows the same structure, so each “wind for the sailboat” is “and he was playing “Do the Hustle” on the accordion,” etc.
And the original, if you don’t already know it:
Imaginary Landscape No. 5 for the Jonas Brothers
by Nick Seaver/John Cage/Jonas Brothers
I made a version of John Cage’s Imaginary Landscape No. 5 in MaxMSP. The original score calls for a set of 42 records to be recorded and arranged together in a precise organization (derived from the I Ching). My patch arranges selections from any 42 audio files according to the score, and when finished, allows you to export an .aiff file of the whole 3 minutes. (It also displays the divisions Cage notated in the score, and which tracks are playing at what time, so you have something to look at.)
Supposedly Cage used the score with jazz records to help him overcome his aversion to jazz. The version here uses 42 Jonas Brothers songs.
update: it seems that by using the [normalize~] object in MaxMSP, I’ve messed up some of the subtle amplitude variation from the score. I’ve made a new version of the app with manual volume control instead, and when I have a moment, I’ll swap that in and put up a new audio file with fewer sudden, unscored amplitude shifts.
update 2: audio file fixed, still need to polish up the app.
update 3: app fixed, uploaded, rejoice, etc.
The patch [download if you have Max]
The app [should work with any folder of 42 audio files, mp3, aiff, or wav, but probably only on Intel Macs]
