Tracks inspired by an exercise on the Learning Sound and Synthesis course to create a synthesised natural world sound, in my case flies.  The flies sound is created from a specific frequency sawtooth wave FM modulated by a blend of coloured noise.  The aim was try and create the illusion of the flies moving around the space.  The accompaniments are soundscapes created using the various audio and gate outs of a Benjolin II synthesizer processed in various ways through filters and VCAs with complex envelopes and effect units and routed via sequential switches under random control.  All tracks are recorded as one off live performances.

Inspired by the Flies

This playlist is a collection of my favoured recordings.  All tracks have been created following taking Sarah Belle Reid's online Learning Sound and Synthesis course in early 2021 that cemented my interest in modular synthesis and the follow up From Patch to Polished course I took in Spring 2022.  Most tracks are performances of improvised compositions recorded in real time to two track stereo, some have been arranged and mixed in Ableton Live.  Any mastering has been done in Sound Forge.  Its up to you whether you love or hate what you hear, I make no claims to be a good musician.  But the best art should polarise your view one way or the other, the worst art is that which does nothing for you - elevator music perhaps?

Love It OR Hate It That's Up To You

I have tried to create a soundscape of flies buzzing around, landing, moving about silently and taking off again from somewhere else against a backdrop of moving water and chimes chiming in the wind. 

The fly sound is created from a sawtooth wave with FM by a blend of blue and red noise.  The sweet spot for the effect is very narrow, the sawtooth is an E4 note at about 339 Hz and the amount of FM modulation has a very fine band, about 10:00 in my set up.  Most of the effort has gone into creating random bursts of sound from the continuous sawtooth drone using a random stepped CV created by the Wogglebug to modulate both the Dynamix (a combined non resonating VCF and VCA) and the panning of the sound in the X-Pan.  The Function CV modulates the amount of cross fading between the channel fed with the output of the Dynamix and the channel with nothing feeding it.  This creates a backdrop sound of flies almost like a reverb effect.  The Wogglebug and Function are in a feedback loop to further randomise the overall output.

The water sound is white noise from the Doepfer fed through the MakeNoise QPAS stereo filter with a little modulation to change the rate of the left and right channels to create some stereo effect from the mono feed in.  The wind chimes are created from Mutable Instruments Marbles creating random gates and CVs to feed the Mutable Instruments Rings sound source.

Flies Chimes And Water

A synthesised swarm of flies buzzing around.

A Pesky Swarm of flies

Flies III

Flies II

Chaos Beat

New Dawn II

These tracks are various live experiments with a modular system based around either a After Later Audio Benjolin V2 or Make Noise Telharmonic as the main sound source.  They are purely demos inspired by the synth course I have taken.  I use SoundCloud so that other course participants can listen.

Ambient I

Alternative version of track  combining various audio outputs from the Benjolin including the happy accident bass riff processed through various filters, VCAs controlled with various envelopes plus the specific synthesised sound of flies.

Benjolin And The Flies II

Benjolin And The Flies V

Benjolin And The Flies VII

I am a retiree who has caught the modular synthesiser bug.  The tracks I upload whether experiments or finished tracks are inspired from taking the Sarah Belle Reid "Learning Sound and Synthesis" and "From Patch To Polished" courses over 2020-2022 that have opened my ears to alternative approaches to composition, sound and music.  I am not a traditional musician but an electronic musician and describe my work as electronic sound art.

Benjolin And The Flies VII

AGAlGonzo