A Pixitracker chiptune (sort of) that combines Roland TR-909 percussion samples, the Emu Modular's "Pong!" noise, some classic noises from the Commodore-64's MOS 6581 chip played as bass line and (*cough* my first real attempt at a *cough*) melody, and a violin played arco vibrato.  While messing around with this song I kept thinking of a group of people heatedly debating something or other, with lots of arms-going-up movements and gestures toward someone else with fingers held together like a bird's beak.  Coruscating waterfalls of primary colors make up the others in the debate and undulating sheets of kelly and forest green underpin the sides of the debate almost but not quite talking over one another.

TR-909 samples gifted by an old friend.  C64 samples from ODO's collection.  Violin samples from Idk1609@freesound.

Lively Debate v1.0

This track is so old, I've largely forgotten what samples I used for it.  Messing around with them I kept getting visuals of springs of many different kinds, bouncing, expanding, contracting, and rebounding off of things.  The bass line is one that I've always called "gumband bass," because it gives me visuals of lots of thick rubber bands being plucked and strummed with a weird twitch of the fingertips on top of it.

Made in Pixitracker, assembled out of lots of random samples I have on my hard drive.  If I ever figure out which ones I used in that soundfont I'll update this summary.

Mechanical Funk v1.0

It's been a long time since I've written any music, so I decided to get back into the swing of things by experimenting with found sounds.  I was feeling somewhat nostalgic for the days of dialup BBSes (bulletin board systems).  I've always loved the sounds and visuals I got from listening to modems battle it out over the slightly dodgy copper lines where I lived to negotiate a speed to swap bits with.  BBSes were the place I grew up and came of age - I made friends there that I'm still in regular touch with to this day, and we've been there for each other through good times and bad.  We go to each other's weddings and funerals.  We get together at hacker cons to catch up.  I tried to capture a little bit of that in this song in the sense that it always started out with one phone number, your first BBS, the one you remember most fondly.  On that board you found a few more, and on each of those you found a few more, until you had a list of systems that you dialed into regularly.  Sometimes a board would go offline for some reason; usually it would come back but occasionally it was gone for good.

Toward the end of the heyday of BBSes (around 1998 where I lived) the number of dialup modems dwindled significantly, and I tried to capture that feeling toward the end of the song.  There used to be a couple of dozen, and then there were a dozen, and then there were two, and then... there was silence.  You couldn't find a dialup anywhere, not for love, sex, or money.  All those lovely, shivering, wailing, screaming, chilling, wonderous voices fell silent.  The only thing you could do was pack it in.

Every sound in this song save one is a modem handshake of some kind.  I made certain to avoid the 14.4kbps fax machine handshake that just about every news story about the Net for ten years used because, let's be honest, we're all sick of hearing it.  Instead, I used some of the oldest and oddest modem recordings I could find, from 300bps dialup modems to radio modems to an ancient data-to-fax relay unit.  The speech at the very end is a Hayes AT command which means "Attention: Hang up NOW!"  I generated it with the Festival speech synthesis package, exported as a .wav file, and loaded in as an instrument.

I don't pretend that there is anything like a melody in this track but the multi-layered modem sounds have a rhythm of their own and I tried to work with them rather than force them into an artificial structure.  I did not distort any of the sounds with external audio processing, all of the dynamics were created by playing back each sound at a different pitch and layering them in different ways.  I also exploited the fact that the samples are of different lengths, and some of them overlap Pixitracker frames.

Telecom Jam v1.0

I woke up with half of this track in my head this morning, for some strange reason.  It's far from perfect, more of a warm-up sketch for practice.  I've wanted to experiment with Pixitracker songs that had some form of vocals in them for a while, and this was as good a time as any to see what I could do.  As it turns out, vocal samples can be hard to work with.  Due to a couple of interruptions throughout the day I kept losing large pieces of the song so I'll undoubtedly rework this track in future.

To be honest, I'm not really satisfied with it.  I needed a sample of a bass guitar to really make it work but all I have at the moment is a bunch of C64-bass samples which, while nice aren't the effect I really wanted.  I might have to borrow a bass and record a few of my own.  The song's also a little more bouncy than I really wanted, but I don't think it's bad on its own.  I wanted it to be a little more vocal heavy, and ultimately I might have to call in a few favors, record some friends singing, and mix everything down traditionally - not the sort of thing you can pull together on a lark on a Satuday afternoon.

I hope everybody likes this song for what it is - an experiment.

Credits:
* There is a sample of DJ Griffin at Freesounds performing some Tulavi throat singing that I used in a couple of places.  Aside from cropping the sample for length I performed no processing on the sound at all.  If you don't believe me, look up Tulavi throat singing on Youtube, it's weird and wonderful to listen to what the human voice is capable of. (CC-BA-NC)
* I used a sample by Killbaybee at Freesounds called Egyptian Ghost Singing, which required a little normalization to get good volume out of.  It had just the kind of ethereal feel that I was looking for, which I don't think I could do myself right now.  I also had to crop it a little bit to fit into my frame-scheme.  (CC-BY)
* Last but not least, to make everything fit together properly at the 50% and 80% marks I had to use a one second sample of silence (yup, nothing) to implement rests.  It was uploaded by Parcodeisuoni at Freesounds, and was exactly what I needed.  (CC-BY)

The Doctor

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