Category: music

These are the demos I made for an Able­ton device con­test before real­iz­ing we weren’t meant to pro­duce demos.

What you’ll hear here are snap­shots of a dynam­ic sys­tem. The real ver­sions come out dif­fer­ent­ly each time they’re played, much as the repeat­ing sec­tions here aren’t real­ly repeat­ing. These will be longer clips than usu­al, to demon­strate that variation.

The idea, of course, is not to cre­ate end­less loops like this, but to build a frame­work where the over­ly sim­ple source mate­r­i­al used here is replaced by live input from a real musician.

Again, they’re just exper­i­ments. Details are pro­vid­ed below each music player.

* * *

• The var­i­ous pitched instru­ments are ran­dom­ly select­ing notes (with­in the same scale).
• The drum part is one short loop, with many hits removed at ran­dom, and some of the remain­ing ones repeat­ed as ghost notes.
• The low­er bell sounds are using the same tricks as the drums, with dif­fer­ent set­tings (and a sync’d delay to fill in gaps and give them some groove). They’re inspired by javanese gamelan
• The brighter bell sounds ring longer and play less often, as a melod­ic ele­ment to tie things together

* * *

• Rhythms are bro­ken up with sim­i­lar tricks as before
• The bass part is actu­al­ly a stream of long steady notes, gat­ed against the drums to cre­ate the illu­sion that a live bass play­er and drum­mer have played a lot of shows together.
• The scrib­bly notes (for lack of a bet­ter term) only plays with­in that same rhythm, but delayed by a beat.
• The organ part fol­lows sim­i­lar rules to the bass, but sidechained against unheard elements

* * *

• The pitch­es of a repeat­ing pat­tern are ran­dom­ized on the piano.
• Drums and piano both drop notes at ran­dom, to vary the rhythm.
• I might have over­done it on the fx
• Heavy reverb fills the space where no drums are playing
• The piano swaps between two audio chains when the drums are not play­ing. One ver­sion is rec­og­niz­able as the piano. The oth­er becomes the repeat­ing flute sounds you hear.