Re: [microsound] Undirected music

["dennis mcnulty" <u_mack@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have programmed an MSP patch to do something similar to this. It was 
inspired to a certain extent by Cages 'Imaginary Landscape No. 4'.

The patch consists of a number of identical modules which occasionally 
(pseudo-randomly) trap fragments of audio from an incoming audio stream. 
These audio fragments have a random amount of silence appended to them and 
this audio/slience fragment is then looped. This looping audio is faded up 
from silence and down to silence again over a period of time which is also 
selected pseudo-randomly.

The output of several of these looping modules (my CPU would only allow 4) 
are then mixed together. The range of 'randomness' for the various factors 
was adjustable.

So by feeding any audio stream into this 'patch', you could create a 
constantly evolving sonic texture. The amount of silence in the resultant 
stream is adjustable (to an extent). Its kind of like granulation, but too 
sparse and lumpy (??)

I tried it with a number of audio streams, but it worked best (in my 
opinion) with TV. I would turn on the TV and feed the audio thru the patch 
whicl watching the images. The result was like a really incredible 
deconstruction of the program audio. Detaching the audio from the images 
made it possible to hear the various sonic components again ... speech, FX , 
music. I never realised how much coughing there was in an episode of 'Murder 
She Wrote' !!

I have applied the patch to music, and have had some interesting results. It 
seems to work best on music without percussion (to my ears).

I've probably wandered off topic a bit, but I could see this discussion 
wandering into an area that really interests me. The world is full of 
constant audio streams which could be manipulated in realtime using various 
strategies to provide an evolving soundworld(not necessarily always 'good' 
but hopefully always interesting). Like webmixing (??) but more 
algorithmic/automatic.

d.

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>.... i think there are allot of people working with this idea,

<snip> --------------

   one day I would like to think we could use undirected
   music to replace background music in public spaces
   like shopping malls or airports and other places they
   play continuous music

   .simon

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