VIRTUAL SPACES

After making what were in some ways conventional "musique concrete" works from the recordings I had made in Mayer Park I decided to use the more complex processing and re-synthesis capacities of Audiomulch. This also allowed me to "sample" the previous sound works I had presented already and to re-present them in a different context, a transformative and generative one.

If you look at the "PMixer" contraption it is getting audio from many sources:

1: the "raw" field recording that featured the bat flying past preceded and followed by walking sounds and surrounded by the distant calls of currawongs and other birds

2: a short edited snippet of the bat flying past on a loop

3: a texture made from up to 90 different transformed recordings of the bat sounds (transformed via changes in pitch, speed, position in space, equalisation, frequency shifting and comb filtering) layered and mixed and fed into a granulator that samples extremely small fragments of the sound at regular but varying intervals, transposes, reverses, shapes and loops them and feed this into a resonant reverb patch that emphasises pitch content

4: the "drone" work I presented as part of the site analysis that had a prominent lawnmower drone throughout feeding into a resonant filterbank that extracts pitch content from complex sounds

5: small loops of the currawongs singing from a field recording feeding into four delay lines whose timings are controlled by the metasurface and feeding further into a resonant filterbank that extracts and emphasises pitched content (this creates the background of slowly changing ringing "chords" in the piece)

6: a pair of sine waves, each drifting very slowly around 37Hz which creates variable beatings which speed up and slow down depending upon the difference between the two frequencies at any one time (these were automated as they needed to be absolutely precise and they are formed in such a way that they appear to speed up towards the climax of the piece

There is also a pair of "pulse combs" which further modulate some of the sounds by comb filtering a sound in a periodic manner and again the speed of this transformation was controlled live by the metasurface .

In general nearly all sonic materials are presented simultaneously "raw" and processed or fed into another process as well. Ultimately I wanted to be able to move between a more or less "real" sound and sounds that would be transformed more radically but still possess the character and "grain" of the original sound.