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[microsound] songs that sample themselves

What about a track which only samples itself? Alot of the music I've been writing for the past 2 years is based on recursive amplitude-triggered sampling. I use Buzz for this (a program that's really not suited for this kind of generative music, but I like working with restrictions) - what I do is take a sound generator like a drum machine, play it into a sampler, then transpose or time-alter the sample and play it back through a gate which triggers sounds on the drum machine. I think writing beat patterns is really tedious and this is a good way to generate complex beats and exercising high-level control over them by tweaking the amount of feedback between the gate and the sounds it's triggering, or filtering the stream of sounds before it goes to the sampler.
Some examples here:
http://www.erstwhile.net/audio/newagealarmclock/riseoverrun-New%20Age%20Alarm%20Clock--03-New%20Age%20Alarm%20Clock.mp3
(this one evolves slowly over 30 minutes)
I've also composed some computer music with no samples at all, using the built-in analog sound capabilities (the beeper and the FM music chip on old Soundblasters) of obsolescent PC's -
http://www.erstwhile.net/audio/index.php?pdir=blips
http://www.erstwhile.net/audio/index.php?pdir=1bit

I think people who compose music with computers tend to be more interested in high-level ordering of sounds and less interested in making sequences of individual notes, which can lead to people falling into the rut of "running a field recording through 4 pitch transposers and 12 delays" or "i'm going to play this loop 800 times through a filter and mess with the bandwidth." What I don't like about most music software is that the whole patch and ensemble metaphor replicates a physical recording studio ("I patch my guitar into the delay pedal, then patch that in the equalizer"), which is fine if you want to record a band on your PC. . Performing music with analog instruments is linear and temporal, (as is listening to any kind of music, though I'd love to be able to download a song into my brain as fast as I can download it onto my computer) but composition isn't slow listening or listening on paper (Charles Wourninen says alot about that in his book "Simple Composition"). I think computer based music is still stuck too much on an interface that replicates an analog process and doesn't take advantage of what a computer is designed to do: non-linear, non temporal processing of data. I need to look futher into that "generative music in perl" article. I'd love to be able to have a macro language where I can tell a computer something like "take sound N, cut it into X segments, and play back all permutations of those segments, where the segment with the lowest frequency comes first." 


But I'm really ranting specifically here about sample-based work, which I'm coming to despise in microsound. Is that all we can do? Can anyone on the list make a decent microsound track created from NO PRIOR RECORDED MATERIAL, their own or otherwise? I'm not talking about chopping up your field records and looping them through AudioMulch, or remixing your trash-folder of 2-sec recordings of your crashing hard-drive. Who's doing sample-less work? Or, on the other hand, who is doing risk-taking sample-based work that takes full advantage of the identity of its sources as a way to generate new meanings and recycle culture through the historical onflow of their manipulations?

-=the pHarmanaut


---- other's wrote ----

i'm all about it. there are lots of open source or virtually public sound sources out there if you're clever. also, i duly approve the use of small enough snippets or overly processed bits that could near impossibly be identified.
-ryan dunn
http://www.liscentric.com

On Sep 12, 2004, at 2:36 PM, visa wrote:



Hi,
there hasn't been any microsound projects in a while, has there? I was
thinking that it might be fun to do something related to the recent decision
by the us federal appeals court which ruled all uncleared sampling illegal:
http://news.bostonherald.com/national/view.bg?articleid=43259

It would imo be interesting to do a project more or less subtly opposing
this ruling. Like for instance, doing tracks entirely from uncleared
samples, but processed unrecognizable...

Is anyone interested in a project like this?

~Visa





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