Impossible Acoustic

I’ve been reflecting on the topic of choice as it relates to interface design.  Whether you’re talking about a web page, your alarm clock, or computer software, there seems to be an inverse relationship between flexibility and usability.  A large number of input options means more control but is potentially confusing; while fewer input options means a loss of control but greater ease of use.  Of course the most brilliant designs are the ones that have a simple interface but allow for complex behaviors.  

  In the DAW world Ableton Live owes a great deal of it’s success to it’s simplistic yet versatile interface.  Kontakt on the other hand has a complex user interface and, in my opinion, a steep learning curve.  The reward for taking the time to learn all the little secrets is a great deal of control and many many options for manipulating sound.  

  Another feature of Kontakt is the ability to create your own user interfaces using the script editor.  While it’s possible to script completely new functionality, frequently, custom interfaces simply mirror controls that already exist within the Kontakt interface.  Even though numerous controls exist within Kontakt already, adding custom interfaces is a great way to guide the user towards specific options, thereby shaping the nature of the instrument.  It’s sort of like creating a big flashing neon signs that says “don’t worry about those knobs over there, try twisting these knobs”.  It’s a form of creation through subtraction and re-emphasis.   

  When it comes to user interfaces for audio applications, there is the question of how much visual feedback is appropriate.  I must admit, I like my interfaces to graphicaly reflect as much as possible, but there’s a serious risk involved with this kind of visual feedback.  The danger is that we will hear what we see and not what is really happening.  Our mind manipulates our senses and favors visual imput over auditory.   Watch this video on the McGurk effect and you’ll understand what I’m getting at. 

   Now you can see why, after hours of watching your music play inside the your DAW, it’s a very good idea to give it a listen with eyes closed or the monitor turned off.  

     For the instrument for this post, I incorporated both the idea of a simple interface with complex results and an interface that prioritizes careful listening over visual feedback.  And, just for the fun of it, it’s a puzzle too!  There are just three unlabeled knobs.  You’ll have to listen carefully to figure out what they do.  Here’s a hint – the functionality of the knobs changes depending on the status of the other knobs.  There is no sound when you first load it up, there are a few visual clues but you’ll have to figure out  the rest by yourself.   Or, once you’ve got it to make sound you can just randomly twist knobs and see what happy accidents you come across.  Here are some of the sounds that are possible to make with this instrument.  

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Have fun!

  Have you ever spent hours in a video store, completely unable to decide what movie you want to watch?  Have you ever felt overwhelmed just setting foot into a bookstore or a supermarket?  How about this, do you feel like you have a wealth of creative ideas inside your head, but when you sit down to work you feel blocked and unable to get it out?  It turns out, there are physiological reasons for all of this.  Our brains can only process a surprisingly small amount of information at one time.  Too many options, especially options of relatively equal value, and our brains literally become overloaded.  

  And talk about options.  In this day and age, we have historically unprecedented choice in almost every category of life.  There are millions of products to buy; millions of movies, tv shows, magazines, and other media to chose from .  We have greater freedom than ever before to pick our career, where we live, who we befriend, who we spend our lives with.  In an increasingly secular society, we must also choose our own belief systems, and moral principles.  It is even possible to choose our gender or to surgically alter our appearance.  Is it any wonder that along with this wealth of options comes unprecedented levels of depression and mental illness?

  In music as well, we are in the midst of a renaissance of opportunity and choice.  It is now possible to walk around town with days and days of music on one mp3 player.  It is more and more common for musicians draw inspiration from multiple genres and traditions.  As electronic musicians, our options have expanded exponentially due to the advent of new technologies.  With the hundreds of sample libraries on the market, we can choose from thousands of instruments or we can synthesize and re-synthesize completely new instruments.  The possibilities for new music are endless and potentially very overwhelming.  

         The show Radio Lab recently did an episode dedicated to the issue of choice.  One of the points of this show is that while the rational mind can whittle down our options,  in the end we rely on our emotions to make the final choice.  It is no wonder then, that those of us with highly analytical minds, are much more susceptible to succumbing to option overload – the endless consideration of choices of similar value.   

  Option overload is something I am intimately aquatinted with.  It used to prevent me from getting anything done at all, but over the years I have found a few helpful techniques.

1) Create deadlines – I don’t know how many times I’ve read interviews with composers who speak of the joy, yes joy, of working under a tight deadline.  It’s often astonishing the quality of work we can turn out when forced to make quick decisions.  Somehow it doesn’t work as well when the deadlines are self imposed, but it helps.  

2) Create limitations – This is largely what this blog is about.  Hopefully I have demonstrated the creative explosion that takes place under strict limitations.  

3) Have a vision – Try making decisions before you even start writing a song.  Pick instrumentation, form, length, as much as possible, and stick with it.  You’ll thank yourself later.  

2) Pick a genre – What is genre but a set of limitations on music?  The traits of a genre reduce many of the larger decisions (instrumentation, rhythm, feel, harmonic vocabulary, form etc) and allow the composer to focus on subtler matters.  

3) Take a break – Walk away and come back to the problem later.  It’s amazing the difference even five minutes can make.  

4) Use the “Save As” option – Often, when I come to a significant crossroads in a song, I’ll save an extra copy.  That way, I tell myself, I can always go back if I don’t like where the decision takes me.  I almost never go back, but sometimes establishing a safety net is the only way I can make big decisions.  Does the non-destructive nature of digital editing help with, or enable indecisiveness?  

5) Focus – I am reminded of the truism “You can do anything, but you can’t do everything.”  You might have dozens and dozens of plugins at your disposal but how well do you know how to use them all?  Sometimes it’s better to have a smaller toolset that you are well acquainted with then a large one you barely know how to use.  

5) Trust your gut – The emotional portions of our brains are actually much much more powerful than our analytical minds.  I tend to distrust my emotional mind for being too um…emotional; subject to making decisions based on habit or irrational association.  However, I am increasingly forced to conclude that the key to effective decision making has much more to do with intuition than analysis.  

6) Get over it – Some people just don’t have a problem with option overload and to them this probably all seems silly.   For others it’s just not that simple.    

  The instrument for this week attempts to find a balance between choice and randomization.  Instead of creating a drum kit with twenty five different sounds on twenty five different keys, I clumped the sounds into categories and mapped them to just five keys.  Playing a C for instance will play once of five bass heavy sounds, F# one of five clicky sounds.  So you can choose what type of sound you want to play, but you have little control over the exact file that will be triggered.  Here’s what this sounds like on it’s own -

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And here it is in the context of a song - 

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The drum kit, which was made from recordings of items found at the radio station where I work, is available on the downloads page along with the Koto sounding instrument.  

A few weeks ago, I decided to play around with the idea of “playable loops”.  For this post I thought I would revisit this concept and add envelope controlled effects modulation to the mix.  As it turns out, this simple addition can totally transform a sound.  As an example, the following is me singing and beating on my chest.

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When it comes time to modulate effects, there are lots of options in Kontakt, including drawing in your own envelopes right on the waveform itself.

Here’s the same vocal loop with some delay and the above pictured envelope controlling the cutoff of a high pass filter.

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Now the same loop again but with distortion added.

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Just three basic effects, but would you ever guess it’s me beating on my chest?

Also, here’s the harpsichord played with chopsticks loop from the previous post.  First with no effects and then with an envelope controlled filter and envelope controlled distortion.

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As usual, there are free Kontakt instruments available on the download page including a multi which sounds like this;

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    The song for this post took me for-ev-er!  The power and freedom of choice that comes with digital technology is a double edged sword.  On the one hand anything is possible and on the other hand anything is possible! When writing for an orchestra or a funk band the instrumentation is limited and therefore the composer doesn’t need to make as many decisions concerning timbre.  This gives the composer a framework to work within.  With electronic music there is no framework.  At any moment, it’s possible to use any sound you can conceive of and create.  This can lead to what I call “option overload” – standing at a crossroads of equally viable solutions and not knowing which one to pick.

    One solution is the “composition by exploration” approach; experimenting and letting the sounds you discover shape the composition.  The other approach is to conceive of a song in your head and make the sounds necessary to fulfill that vision.  The real life outcome is usually somewhere between these two approaches.  Generally, I tend towards the “composition by exploration” method.  The problem with this method, is that it’s very tempting to give in to laziness, to warp the composition to fit the sounds rather than shape the sounds to fit the composition.  This time around, I had a pretty clear vision for the song early on and challenged myself to stick to that vision and make the sounds fit.  It wasn’t easy, and I compromised in a few places, but overall I got what I was going for.

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If you’re curious about the two lead instruments and the bass sound, they were all made from an old beat up guitar I have.   I’ll polish them up and release them at a later date.

    Tim Prebble over at “The Music of Sound” has been hosting a series of music projects he calls “Synesthesia”.  He posts a picture and asks his readers to translate the image into music.  Simple in concept but challenging in application.  How exactly does one translate an image to music?  

  After deciding to give it a shot, my first impulse was to try to directly translate visual elements to sonic elements much like how I imagine someone with synesthesia would.  Synesthesia is a rare condition in which stimulation of one sense results in sensations from another.  Hearing or even thinking about words for example, could cause involuntary taste sensations.  In some cases, people perceive color when they hear sounds or perceive sounds when they see colors.  I have no idea what it looks like when someone with synesthesia “sees” a sound, but it’s not hard for me to imagine that it might look like the picture above.  

The question is then, what is the system of representation from sonic to visual and back again?  Since there are three prominent dots in this picture, it seems logical that each dot would represent a pulse of sound or a note.  I chose to use phrases of three notes throughout the song and three instruments harmonized like the blending of colors.  Also, in both the picture and my translation of it, there is the suggestion of detailed activity in the background but buried beneath all the haze and blur.

The main problem with translating image to sound is the issue of time.  A photograph is static, unmoved by time, whereas music is inexorably linked to it.  At first, I thought the music could represent the image as it is scanned by the eye from left to right or top to bottom.  It wasn’t until I read comments by the other contributors that I realized I was overlooking the obvious – while the image itself is static, our relationship to it is not.  

When you I first look at the image I see three dots on a blurry background.  Then, the longer I gaze, the more details I see.  As I become more focused, I become more emotionally engaged as well.  There is the initial emotional response, then an appraisal of the pieces aesthetic qualities and then, if I’m open to it, a deeper identification.  The piece of art becomes for a moment an extension of my psyche and a mirror of my emotions.  The progression of the music, the addition of instruments and the building climax of emotion, parallels my relationship with the picture.    

Here is my musical interpretation of Tim’s photograph.  You can check out the other contributions here.  As usual, this song was made with all original instruments which I have included for free on the download page.  

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    In the late 1940s, the first boxed cake mixes were marketed to housewives across the country.  The initial sales were unexpectedly low, so food companies surveyed women to find out why the product was so unpopular.  What they found was that most women felt  the “just add water” convenience of the cake mixe was too easy.  It felt like cheating, like the cook wasn’t contributing anything.  To solve this, the company simply removed a few ingredients from the mix and added instructions   to add eggs, milk, or butter.  This was enough so that women felt like they were actually cooking. After that cake mixes went on to become a household staple.   

    I can relate to this story.  Just like the housewives of the 40s and 50s, I find that the convenience of using loops to make music doesn’t leave me feeling like I can really call the finished product my own.   I want to feel that I’ve put something of myself into the music I make and I don’t feel that way after stringing loops together.  Recently though, I’ve discovered a compromise which I call “playable loops”.  These are loops that can be played on the keyboard.  Once recorded, I have no control over the loops themselves, but by playing them at different pitches, rhythmicaly re-triggering them, and layering them in different ways, I feel like I’m actually performing and not just doing a “paint-by-number”.  

  In keeping with the cooking theme, the first beat is played on a metal mixing bowl.  To make things more interesting, I put my head right up next to the bowl and made vowel shapes with my mouth.  Listen and you can hear the filtering effect this has.  

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  Creating a beat like this from a multi-sampled instrument would be difficult.  Getting the sound of the bowl  with both finger and fingernail strikes would require multiple sets of articulations.  Replicating the mouth filter effect in a natural sounding way would be near impossible.  Loops are a bit paradoxical, while they are static in the sense that they’re the same every time, the contents of the loop can be much more dynamic than a multi-sampled instrument.  

  In order to play the loop at different pitches, I simply mapped the loop across the keyboard.   In order to align the loop with the track tempo, I used Kontakt’s “Beat Machine” mode.  I’ve also added a release sample so that now, when the loop is played across multiple pitches at a faster tempo it sounds like this.  

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  I have also made two more instruments out of two more loops.  The second loop is of autoharp overtones being played with chopsticks…..

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…and the third is a prepared guitar, also played with chopsticks.  I’m alternating between striking the open string and muting the string with my free hand. 

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 Playing all of these loops together as a multi is incredibly fun.  It’s like having an entire band at your fingertips.  Sure, the rhythms are always the same, but what would otherwise take hours of tracking and programing can now be played live.  Nice and convenient, just like a cake mix.  The following song is a live recording of me playing the multi on my keyboard without any overdubs.

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    By default, Kontakt operates in what’s called DFD (direct from disk) mode.  In this mode, only a small section of each sample is loaded into memory as a buffer, and the rest is streamed from the disk.  This is a very memory efficient way of doing things and makes it possible for running lots of large instruments all at the same time.  There are several other modes, including “sampler” mode, which are much less memory efficient but open up real-time access to the entire sound file and therefore offer greater sound design potential.  

    On the download page I’ve included four instruments which make use of a script I wrote called the “offset sequencer”.  This script, which only works in “sampler” mode, presents the user with an editable graph.  Each bar in the graph represents a starting point within the loaded sample.  The taller the bar the later the starting point for sample playback.  Because the Kontakt scripting language offers no way of accessing the length of a sample, I’ve included an editable “multiplier” variable which lets the user adjust the upper boundary of the graph.   While a note is held down, the loaded sample is re-triggered at a selected rate and at the different starting points selected in the graph.  Here’s what it sounds like when all four of this week’s instruments are played at the same time.  

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  One could accomplish the very same effect by chopping up a sample into different lengths and mapping each piece to a different key.  One could do this, but as I mentioned in my post “Process = Product” each way of doing things lends itself to certain results.  One could play a rhythm using the above mentioned method and then automate the pitch to create melodies.  The question is, how likely are you to go through all that trouble?  This script makes it easier and therefore much more likely that you would play different pitches.  Of course, this script also makes it more difficult to create rhythms of mixed note values.  

  I would encourage you to try using the script with different samples.  The samples I used to make this weeks instruments include my washing machine, my water bottle,  and a metal mixing bowl.  

  I like the effect created by this script quite a lot and have used it frequently in the film score I’m currently working on.  In the following excerpts from that score, you can hear this effect come in along with the shakers, near the beginning of the first excerpt, and the bell and the clave sound in the second excerpt are treated with this effect.  

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    I have a lot of friends who date or marry people with whom they share a passion.  Since most of my friends are musicians, this means musicians dating and marrying other musicians.  My wife however doesn’t play any instruments, doesn’t have any musical training, and can’t even really carry a tune.

This actually makes her opinions all the more valuable to me.  

    It’s very easy for musicians, especially electronic musicians, to become enamored with certain conceptual aspects of the music they make and lose track of the overall impact.  It’s not uncommon for me to put a lot of energy into an effect for example, or the design of a particular instrument, or some clever harmonic device.  I might then write a song that features whatever concept or device it is that I’ve fallen in love with.  Being really excited about my new song I’ll play it for my wife who will say as nicely as she possibly can “it sounds like a bunch of random noise.”  Then I’ll get really indignant and say “but you don’t understand, you don’t appreciate all the work that went into this, you just don’t get it?”  To which she’ll respond “You’re right, I don’t get it.”  Then I’ll get annoyed and ask her to leave the room and sit and sulk for a while but eventually I have to admit to myself that she is right.  

    It all depends on who your intended audience is.  If you’re making music for other musicians who can appreciate the hours it took to make that crazy noise or your impressive mastery of 12 tone composition then have at it.  For me though, music is a form of communication and I hope to be as widely understood as possible.  Utilizing the technical elements of music theory and music production in a way that is emotionally accessible is at the core of what I’m trying to accomplish and having someone close to me who can provide me with a layman’s perspective is often annoying but absolutely essential.  

    I bring this up now because I just spent the better part of last week building an instrument that ended up sounding like crap.  I knew there were problems early on, but I convinced myself I could save it with processing and some clever scripting.  The more hours I invested in it, the less I wanted to admit to myself just how bad it was.  Once again, it was my wife who had to deliver the reality check.  

    Normally I wouldn’t mention this publicly.  Normally my motto is “If you want to write a good song, write five songs, pick the best one, and don’t tell anyone about the other four.”  However, since this is a blog about the creative process, and failure is a huge part of the process, it seems appropriate to share.  I think a big part of being a more efficient creator is being able to recognize early on which ideas are going to pan out and which are dead ends.  Then again, sometimes I abandon ideas too easily.  Sometimes the roads with giant dead end signs at their entrance can lead to some pretty cool places all the same.  

    So, no instrument or song for this post but look for a new post soon.  Very soon.  

At long last, the saga of the pen continues.  Several weeks ago, I took apart a ball point pen and recorded half an hours worth of fiddling with all the parts inside.  As I made instruments from the recordings, the goal was to stay true to the source material at first, then manipulate the samples in progressively more substantial ways.

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As you can hear from this excerpt, we’ve strayed pretty far from the original pen recordings.  At some point we’ve crossed over from sampling to synthesis.  It’s debatable exactly where the border between the two lies, but I think at this point, we’re well within synthesis territory.

For me there are three kinds of loops – long loops, short loops and really short loops.  Long loops alter but retain some qualities of the original recordings.  As an example, here’s a recording of the silver bit being spun on my kitchen table.

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And here it is again with a large portion of it looped as well as an envelope controlled filter and some panning.

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Definitely a departure from the original, but once it’s pointed out you can hear the resemblance.  But, can you hear the similarity between this sound…

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and this sound?

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Even though both sounds are played at the same pitch, the second sound sounds so drastically different because I only looped a small section of the waveform – about 10 cycles as you can see from this picture.

If you loop an even smaller section, then what’s left is just a completely unremarkable sounding simple waveform.

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Waveforms like this are the basis of most synthesizers and like most synthesizers, through layering, filtering, and envelopes these simple sounds can become much more complicated.  Since this process is the same as the process used in most synthesizers, the result sounds like most synthesizers as well.   The question is then – why not use synthesizers?  An argument could be made for the knowledge and control that comes from making these sounds “from scratch”  An argument could also be made that these sounds still retain some organic flavor due to their acoustic source material.  What do you think?

For some reason this weeks song took a lot of work to put together.  First of all, tuning all the instruments so that they played well together was a royal pain.  Second of all, the song itself didn’t come into being easily.  I have a little phrase I use frequently – “it’s not the ideas that work that are time consuming, it’s the ideas that don’t work.”  Experimentation is not an efficient process.  The track below is what I came up with after completely starting over three times and revising this final concept dozens of times.  I’m happy with the final result, but I think by delving so deeply into a purely electronic realm, I’ve gotten away from what has excited me about the other songs I’ve done, which is the tension between acoustic and digital.

There are fifteen, yes fifteen, original instruments available on the download page.  Both the instruments and the song are made entirely from one ball-point pen.

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P.S.

I spent more time on the programing of these instruments (layering, tuning, adjusting envelopes, effects etc.) than any other instruments I’ve made.   All together however, they total only one and a half megabytes.  It just goes to show, don’t judge a sample library by it’s size.

     So, part III of the Pen series is going to have to wait until I’m a little less busy.  In the meantime, last week’s post reminded me of an interesting essay I read about Charles Ives some time ago.  There was one anecdote from the essay that has always stuck with me.  Ives was talking about writing for a section of programmatic music intended to evoke images of fireworks.  He said that since, in order to make fireworks one must carefully measure ingredients and follow rigid recipes, music about fireworks should be constructed in a similar manner.  He therefore made up a set of formulas and rules for his musical fireworks and composed them in a very mathematical fashion.  What fascinated me about this was not only the idea that process effects product but that a composer could, perhaps should, be purposeful in choosing how to approach a piece of music.  

I think for many of us process is personal.  We all have our ways of doing things that have come about more through repetition and habit than through forethought and planning.  There are composers who put pen to paper, those who record improvisations, those who start with the melody and work down, those who start with a groove and work up, those who work with loops, those who never work with loops, and on and on.  But how many of us truly use process as a tool?  

Since I was a piano player and performing musician before I started making electronic music my normal process is to play each part on the keyboard and then go back and tweak what I’ve recorded.  Of course, I have my habits as a piano player but the keyboard itself also encourages and discourages certain patterns.  For example, fast and complex patterns on single notes or single chords are difficult but arpeggios are easy so, music played on a keyboard tends to contain more of the latter and less of the former.  

About a year ago I decided to make a song using a very different approach than my normal approach.  I took an old beat up guitar, listened to a click track on headphones and spent an afternoon recording loops and rhythms.  I then chopped up these recordings up in Ableton Live and made a little song out of them.  The rhythms I played live on the guitar are very different than the rhythms I would have played on a keyboard and re-sequencing audio loops tends to sound different than working with midi.  

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In keeping with the theme of altering methodologies, I’ve put raw loops on the download page rather than the usual Kontakt instruments.  Next week, once I make some headway on my other obligations, I’ll continue with the next ball point pen installment and we’ll see how something as simple as looping can rocket us to a whole new level of sound design.  

    In the book “The Way It Is” Ajahn Sumedho spoke about his first few years as a Buddhist monk.  At the monastery where he stayed, monks were required to follow hundreds of rules concerning every aspect of their life.  From eating to sleeping to sweeping the walkways, everything had to be done in a very specific way.  At first he was frustrated with how arbitrary the rules were, until one day, he realized that that was the point.  The rules were meant to be arbitrary because, while it didn’t ultimately matter how the walkways got swept, the rules forced a confrontation with his habits and brought into focus patterns he hadn’t realized were ever there.  

  While my goals are considerably less ambitious than Ajahn Sumedho’s, this whole business of using limited source material and limited effects has required that I deviate from my usual ways of sampling and composing and discover some new ones.  For example, while making the song this week, I came to a point where I really really wanted some sort of sustaining sound.  Normally I would have taken this sound (made by blowing across the top of the tube)….

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and looped the end portion to create a sound like this…

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  Luckily, I had decided not to use looping at all this week and save it for a post of it’s own.  I say luckily because, had I followed my usual methods, I probably would have overlooked the wonderfully strange sound created by simply pitching this same sample down several octaves.  

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Also, the same sample played in reverse sounds like this.

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  Of course, some habits are habits for a good reason and there’s often nothing wrong with the obvious solution.  The limited pitch choice of last weeks “spring buzz” and “tube tap” sounds can be easily remedied by mapping those samples across multiple keys in Kontakt.  I also reworked the Battery kit from last week by simply changing the pitches of each cell.  Extreme pitch shifting can have surprising results.  For example, when pitched up 36 steps, the sound of twisting the clip into place on the tube….

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…sounds like this

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  It’s also possible to create a pitch envelope so that the pitch changes over time.  When this effect is applied to the sound of the silver bit spinning on a table it sounds like this –  

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  Another method of transformation worth talking about is layering.  The mind has a curious way of combining sounds that happen at the same time.  The following sound seems like a single instrument right?

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Actually it’s three versions of the “Tube Tap” instrument transposed up 0 steps, 12 steps and 19 steps respectively and one instance of the “Tube Flick” instrument.  Listen.

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   Assigning the same midi input to a set of instruments is an easy way to experiment with different combinations of instruments.  Considering that each instrument can have its own individual pitch, volume, volume envelope, and effects etc the possibilities are many.  There are several multis on the download page as well as a few instruments built from layered samples.  

  As with last week, the song this week was made entirely from pen sounds manipulated and made into instruments using the techniques discussed.  I also used heaping portions of delay and reverb as well as one instance of a grain delay plugin cuz I just couldn’t help myself.

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