Thanks to the content of the creative sound project module I’ve been looking more and more into using sampling in my pieces, I’ve always been more interested into the Musique concrète side of sound art, I find the use of real world sounds which are then manipulated into something else to be a very creatively fulfilling process, it forms the basis of my approach to sound design, I find that, since the release of star wars, the use of synthesizers for every vaguely technological device (phasers and transporters in star trek) has this intensely artificial feel and I think much more can be achieved with a lot less effort. In beginning my journey into doing sound art I have found that I tend not to create for the purposes of conjuring up an image in a listener’s head, or emulating what one would expect something to sound like, but instead doing sounds for their own sake, to be listened to for themselves. In light of this I have taken to doing radio sweeps
on my little solar powered radio and keeping them for use as a sound source for later manipulation. It’s a rather simple but very therapeutic process you need to do is switch on your radio and slowly go through the frequencies from one end to the other, occasionally stopping on some interesting samples and different kinds of static, here’s the latest one I recorded:
Once I have that I will put it into a sampler/granular synthesiser I love to use called Palindrome, it has four sections which it cycles through in a pattern that is entirely customisable to the user, each sound can have effects placed on it that are also highly customisable, I tend to randomise everything, as it allows me to focus on listening to the sounds themselves and not get bogged down in tweaking, I allow fate to decide. In each of the sections I place the recently recorded radio sweep and allow Palindrome to select where in the 2-5 minute sweep it will take the grains for the granular parts of the program. Because the Radio is a mix of speaking, music, and static, there is a wide range of different sounds that can be achieved, strange morphed speech, strangely musical loops and entirely bizarre sound effects, the following are some samples that I managed to get from feeding the sweep through palindrome:
I think there are many uses for these sounds, steps forward perhaps. There are a few, some I feel can be edited together and used for the purposes of sound effects, sounds of energy weapons and monsters and such. Others can be cut up even further to be put in drum pads and samplers for music production. Some can be edited to make part of a layer in a soundscape, put through a paulstretch or some other form of processing or used as is.
For my own uses I think I’ll give all three a go, perhaps sticking to my roots and leaning more into the sound effects side of things, listening out for potential, using the amazing customisation features on the plugin to reduce some of the noise that one can find in palindrome and really design the sound.