sounds far away but paradoxically as if it's coming from my speakers too .. confusing. /also/ love the piece!

A really deep and beautiful track with an awesome writeup of your process. Thank you.

Great stuff. Best I've heard from this week so far

Thanks.  Interesting to read of the high res digital approach you planned out.  Also the moving mic take.

very beautiful in the tempo and the tone!

Disquiet Junto Project 0229: Fourth Worldizing

Years ago, I used to have reel to reel tape recorders and would record various sounds at different speeds and play them back at different speeds and in different acoustic spaces, bouncing between recorders to create muti-layered noise-scapes.  Samplers at the time didn't provide adequate fidelity when transposing samples downward more than an octave, the sound became grainy and very un-analog. When 192Khz audio interfaces came on the market I was excited, not because of the promise of fantastic sound quality, but because I would be able to capture audio at 4 times the normal 44.1khz working rate and slow it down without significantly degrading the audio. The way I did this, and still do, is to record at 176.4khz and then hack the file header to change the apparent sample rate to 44.1khz. The wonderful SoundHack app allows you to do this easily. Loading the hacked audio file into into my DAW I could get a recording four times slower and two octaves lower and better quality than any hardware sampler.

For this weeks track I took the Hassell reference as a starting point and the recording technique as a means to create the acoustic spaces for the sounds. I set my slightly faulty (dodgy DAC) MOTU Traveler interface to 176.4khz and used a pair of Rode NT2's for recording the sounds used. I used my home studio (not acoustically treated), my hallway (very long, wooden floors) and a bucket. 

I did a similar track last month, using similar techniques, also Jon Hassell inspired. https://soundcloud.com/klaatuberada/lolololo-rain-for-a-fourth-girl

The main drone in the track is a single, heavily modulated note played on an analog synth, sound output via studio monitors and recorded with a hand held microphone. I moved around in the room, centre, corners, while holding the mic to vary the volume and sound quality. I did a second pass where I fed a little of the mic signal back through the monitors, I was able to get some nice gritty feedback which I layered with first recording of the drone. The resultant files were hacked and played back four times slower (2 octaves lower) with all the cable bumps and footsteps and extraneous noise adding to the texture. The percussion loop was recorded in a bucket at 88.2khz and played back twice as slow. A piano part was recorded at 88.2khz and 176.4khz and layered to create the chord stabs that appear periodically. The flute parts were made with "Passion Flute", recorded at 88.2khz from the hall, played back an octave lower. The melodic bit in the middle is a guitar sound played fast and slowed down 4 times, recorded from the hallway. Bass recorded as played. Other little sounds and treatments added. There was quite a bit of hiss in the recordings, which when modulated added a nice little shimmer on the top end.

Alvin Lucier's piece "I Am Sitting In A Room" (1969), is an interesting extrapolation of this process taken to the extreme.

Cover image is a Landsat false colour image (made falser) of Melbourne, AU.

Use a favorite trick of legendary sound designer Walter Murch.

Background: At 2:14 in the following YouTube clip of an interview about the concept of “worldizing” with sound-design legend Walter Murch he plays a bit of a movie, THX-1138, and then describes the process of recording something to get an exaggerated sense of the space in which it was recorded: “If you are in an ordinary sized room and play the voice at four times speed … and you record it on the other tape recorder, also running at this very fast speed, then when you play the other recorder back at normal speed you get the original sound but you get the space of the room as if it was four times larger than it really is.” (Just to expand the idea a bit, the project’s title, “Fourth Worldizing,” is a nod to musician Jon Hassell.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_py6jVyOqUY

These are the steps for the project:

Step 1: Using the trick Murch has provided, make something of it.


APOB - Unsettled Implements [disquiet0229]

New album out now - www.apob.bandcamp.com
New videos here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFg1b4E_CL0M-x6CYKYpusg
Streaming details here: www.apob.com.au

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Patrick Picault

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337is (three three seven is)

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