Wow …
from the link:Sound Clip: Gilligan by Rick Scott
To produce this track, the artist writes that he:
- Acquired the theme music to the original Gilligan’s Island tv show (1:35).
- Played it at .1 to .5 times its original speed in grains from 1 to 1000 ms long.
- Added resonance/delay/reverb.
- Mixed panned forward and backward versions.
- Did minimal mastering (no compression).
The cover of March/April’s Tape Op magazine, illustrating various sonic concepts with drawings of bunnies.
Especially if you are making art.
Tweak and your wish of making something people will like will be granted. Spend lots and lots of time playing with knobs and settings. You’ll be surprised what comes out of fooling around with some piece of equipment.
Make it so it is your sound.
Oh, hell yes!
There’s a whole cosmos of amazing, unexpected, and gratifying places to explore within the options offered by well-designed, tweakable equipment that exposes meaningful controls.
The possibilities exponentially explode even further into uncountable dimensions when using multiple tools which interact with each other in interesting - and ideally non-linear - ways.
The outcome will often be unique and surprising and always be an intuitive, subconscious expression of your own personality, preferences, choices and whims.
Defaults are highly useful as a starting point, an example, and source of inspiration but to not go further and deeper, to consciously experiment and seek out the sweet spots*, to discover and expand your own intimate connection with your creative tools (collaborators!), seems like a real waste of potential if you ask me.
* Of course, the result does not necessarily have to be “sweet.”
wow intense! i would not like it probably. when i sleep i need it 100% dark/black, but i need a little bit of traffic/wind noise/dog snores….i live in the middle of the city so i am probably just used to it.
I hear that.
I find the soft sounds of wind, waves, birds, traffic, rain (especially rain), device hums, muffled voices of pedestrians, distant trains, clouds gossiping about things they’ve spied upon, plants complaining about the weather, my dead heart fluttering fruitlessly, worms sneezing, and so on extremely comforting and soothing.
It is definitely a useful bias to have when living in a city (not that the countryside is really any quieter, just different in its soundscape) and gives those odd moments of pure untainted silence even greater impact.
A typical quiet room you sleep in at night measures about 30 decibels. A normal conversation is about 60 decibels. This room has been measured at -9 decibels.
Orfield Labs uses the room to test products, including switches that go on car dashboards and the sound an LED display makes on a cell phone to make sure they’re not too loud.
Anechoic chambers are really weird and cool.
One becomes incredibly sensitive to the sound of your body’s internal functions: not just the obvious heart beats, but also the pulsations of circulating blood, and the noise that your skin, muscles and bones make as they move.
I tend to become a little unstable in them. No doubt due to the inner ear feeling confused and that having a knock-on effect on it’s gyroscopic functionality.
glad to know there is a name for “that feeling”
Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a physical sensation characterized by a pleasurable tingling that typically begins in the head and scalp, and often moves down the spine and through the limbs.
Most ASMR episodes begin by an external or internal trigger, and are so divided for classification.Type A episodes are elicited by the experiencer using no external stimuli, and are typically achieved by specific thought patterns unique to the individual. Type B episodes are triggered involuntarily by an external trigger, via one or more senses, and may also involve specific thought patterns associated with the triggering event. Both types of triggers vary between individuals, but many are common to a large portion of ASMR enjoyers.
Common external triggers:
- Exposure to slow, accented, or unique speech patterns
- Viewing educational or instructive videos or lectures
- Experiencing a high empathetic or sympathetic reaction to an event
- Enjoying a piece of art or music
- Watching another person complete a task, often in a diligent, attentive manner - examples would be filling out a form, writing a check, going through a purse or bag, inspecting an item closely, etc.
- Close, personal attention from another person
- Haircuts, or other touch from another on head or back
The Border Community producer talks at length about making music with a modular synth.
Lots of lovely pictures of his studio and discussion of his techniques and setup
“There are lots of mistakes in it, but that’s the glory of it. There’s that moment when you’ve been playing with it and it sounds really messy, then all of a sudden it comes together in a way you hadn’t expected. Your ears prick up. Getting to those points is easier and more fun when you do it this way. I could never sit down and write this without having something like this to play with. And also sonically as well, having a really nice synth like this Prophet 600… The different sections of it are configured in a certain way and the level between those sections is predefined in the way the manufacturer decided it should work. I can’t change that. It’s a fixed entity. But if I want to boost the volume of an oscillator so much that when I put it into a VCA it distorts, then I can do that in there. Distortion is really important to my production I think—finding out how different modules distort and where their limits are.”
Silence is Golden; it has divine power and immense energy. Try to pay more attention to the silence than to the sounds. Paying attention to outer silence creates inner silence: the mind becomes still. Every sound is born out of silence, dies back into silence, and during its life span is surrounded by silence. Silence enables the sound to be. It is an intrinsic but unmanifested part of every sound, every musical note, every song, and every word. The unmanifested is present in this world as silence. All you have to do is pay attention to it.Awakened Life: Silence is Golden (via silencesounds)
