Hey all,
I have just released an electroacoustic/experimental album made almost entirely with SC for sound processing and synthesis. The album is based on processed recordings of soundscapes and found objects, with these recordings being altered in SC.
I would love to hear feedback about the album! (I’m also very open to share SC techniques/code if that would be of interest).
Here’s the album:
Thanks for listening!
L
Hi @LTotti . I love the album! The article linked from bandcamp was quite informative too. I would love to hear / see more about the SC techniques and code you used, especially on the processing of recordings you did to create the uncertainty of what was recordings and what was synthesis. As I understood the article you used SC for sound design and then Reaper for mixing, right? Did you also use Reaper for preprocessing of recordings before loading to SC?
Håkan
Hey Håkan, I’m really happy you enjoyed it! Even taking time to read the interview, amazing. As I said in it, it is my first album and it was made quite experimentally, so it truly means a lot that it is getting heard and appreciated.
As soon as things get less busy I can post more about the techniques and code. As for Reaper, I mainly used it for editing/“assembling” and mixing. The only processing done with Reaper was for timesaving and workflow - basic playback rate/reverse, at most some EQing. Also distortion and reverb were added in Reaper, since those came more at the mixing stage and I’m not as versed in their SC possibilities. I’ll post some code soon.
Thank you so much for your support!
L
Good work. Loved the atmosphere. It is really carried by that approach of fuzzing the spaces between generated and recorded. Actually recommended it to a friend from Brazil when he told me about Brazilian electronic music scene (I have never been outside of Europe).
I really like the way synthesised sounds and recordings blend into each other, making both feel equally real / “taktile”.
I would be very interested in the methods you used in supercollider, if you are willing to share any tips 
Hey everyone,
sorry for taking such a long time, I was completely overwhelmed with other stuff plus I managed to lose the first draft I was writing about this.
Here is a sort of summary of the processes I used for the whole album. For conciseness, it’s more text than code and it skips some minor details and techniques. If anyone wants the code for any particular example I’m happy to share, as well as going more in depth about particular sounds.
Again, I’m far from advanced in the technical side of coding and electronic sound, so the descriptions are written more from an artistical point of view.
1st track:
The opening is made with a field recording (FR from now on), slowed down and passed through a Band-Pass Filter that boosts particular frequencies. This is one of my go to techniques for “transfiguring” a FR, as it usually results in a soundscape that is very alien from the original recording and from the spectra associated with direct hearing to environments, yet it mantains a sense of “natural causality” in its morphology/behaviour.
This is in the foreground from the start until 1m30s.
The main processing I used for the central part of the track was taking the processing above (slowed FR → BPF) and doing Amplitude Modulation using a PMOsc as the modulator. This is a technique I don’t really understand the technical side of, so it emerged more through experimentation and perhaps there are established ways of doing this. It resulted in a very interesting high-frequency behaviour and a low-frequency ressonance/drone, depending on the parameters.
It is used for two central elements of the first track. It is the main texture of the middle part, the drone with pulsating high elements that is foregrounded at around 3m10s.
It is also used to process the found objects, which serve as the percussive punctuations “underneath” the main textures throughout the whole track. The recordings of these objects were all sequenced randomically and processed this way, from which I later edited interesting gestures to use.
The ostinato figure that takes the foreground in the last part of the track is a loop of one of these gestures, processed through a super short audio-time delay with many repeats, which transforms impulses into a definite pitch (the delay time for this loop was around 13ms if I recall). This gives the gesture a pitch and also a more resonating timbre. On top of this, a normal delay (~400ms) is slowly faded in until the end.
Beyond these 3 main processing, there is the transition at 1m40s which uses another version of the AM processing, and a sped up FR + BPF loop which is the high-frequency loop that reappears throughout the piece. I believe that covers the main elements of the track.
2nd track:
It opens with a development of the delay processing, superimposing loops of different gestures with different pitches (different delay times). A more natural sounding FR is faded in, though it is also very slightly EQd through the BFP.
The synths: they are all SinOscFB, which is a favorite of mine because the feedback parameter allows for the movement between pure sine waves all the way to noise, which I use to create timbral movement and foregrounding. The low synth holds a single note and fluctuates more heavily towards noise. There is four layers of higher pitched synths that are sequenced harmonically, but with random oscillators controlling the feedback argument. Nothing too fancy in terms of synthesis nor sequencing I believe.
The main texture of the track is these layers of synths over the almost direct long FR.
Some underlying textures that appear towards the end: again thight loops of the objects (13m30s), a less slowed down version of the opening sound plus delay (14m00s), a faded in FR with delay (17m30s), and a cleaner FR at the very end.
I believe that gives an overall direction in terms of techniques used. As I said, I can go into more detail or code for specific sounds. I was also planning on writing a longer sort of blog post about the whole artistic process behind the album, if I get to it I can post it here when it’s done.
Again, thanks everyone for your support and the generous listening, I’d love to talk more about it if there’s anything.
L
Thank you for the kind words!
That was definitely the goal of the album in terms of sound and atmosphere so I’m really happy to hear that.
Thank you for the listen! Again great feedback to hear.
Hopefully the post above was helpful. I guess in terms of general strategy my method was trying to transform the sound spectrum while maintaining something of its morphology/shape/behaviour, as I found this was the dimension which mostly signalled some sort of natural production of the sounds instead of a more mechanical/predictable morphology. Also trying to avoid using any sounds that were completely unprocessed and “high-fidelity”, as to not have a sort of baseline “realistic” sound that would make the others more clearly processed. This was achieved more in the first track, with the second track using cleaner field recordings and purely synthetic sounds, though I figure the end result was that this became more of a spectrum of possibilites I played with.
Cheers,
L