http://basiscraft.com/pubs/imprecession_session.ogg
http://basiscraft.com/pubs/imprecision-number-1.html
---
title: Imprecession #1 (bird and snake) [20220401]
author: Thomas Lord (Berkeley, CA)
...
This recording is my entry for a current round of the a very
serious, silly competition: the **Libre Music Challenge**.
The prompt for this episode of the challenge was to make a
piece of music using only free (as in libre) software but
using no instruments, no synthesizers, and ("so it won't be a
who's got the best microphone contest") nothing but recordings
made with lousy cell phone or laptop microphones.
Sequencers are explicitly allowed under the rules but for
personal reasons I decided to put those on the ban list as
well. See, when I was a teenage nerd I had an interest in
early 20th century "Music Concrete" -- some of the earliest
electronica there was. It was very "tape centric" in that the
main moves for a composer where to cut-up, splice, reverse,
and vary speed on fragments of physical audio tape recordings.
I wanted to explore that idea in the digital domain where you
can zoom right in on the actual wave forms of a recording and
cut and splice with exceeding good precision.
Source recording. I used my cell phone to record:
+ the sound of my clothes dryer tumbling a light load
+ the sound my land line telephone makes if left off the
hook for too long (the "off hook signal" after which I was
tempted to name this track)
+ my wife and I recording some silly dialog to go with the piece
+ a really big aluminum, commercial-kitchen pot lid struck
firmly with the heal of my palm
+ a "this call is now being recorded" warning from a tech giant
that offers some gratis voip service
Everything else you hear is the result of abusing various digital
filters and doing strange edits to the "tape".
I don't know if it counts as cheating or not but in the final
section of the piece you'll hear a distinct chord of fairly clean
tones. How did this come to be? I edited wave forms at very high
resolution.
The off hook klangston, it turns out, contains something like a
somewhat dirty sine wave. I zoomed way in, snipped that, and got
a tiny audio segment that sounded like a "click". I almost-doubled
its length by splicing two copies together, lining up the waves. Then
I doubled that, doubled that, doubled that, and so on for a few folds
and soon had a few minutes of "almost a tone".
Various pitch altering techniques were abused to beat that
almost-tone into what you hear. Throughout the piece, selective
editing and stretching-and-shrinking without pitch preservation are
heavily used.
Fragments of sound are layed out with reference to a 120bpm gride
divided into 16th notes and triplets --- but much of it is
deliberately not exactly "on grid". Hence the name:
[Imprecession #1 (bird and snake)](imprecession_session.ogg)
Technique notes....
## Track: "pot lid ride":
A very large diameter pot lid struck with the palm of my heal. This
is the "gunshot-like" sound in the first half of the piece. I think
I shrunk the clip to raise the pitch. It uses a "Calf Filter" set
up as a 12dB high pass filter, an unfancy generic reverb ("Zita
reverb ambient") and the Calf Tape Simulator to smudge out some
glitches.
## Tracks: "bass [one,two,three]"
These are the plodding almost-a-triad bass line in the first half of
the recording. They are all the "off hook" noise edited into
"almost a tone" and then tortured through "Audio Driver (suboctive
divider)", a 5 band "Calf Equalizer" with resonance points,
configured awkwardly, a ring modulator, and to mix it down -- a pair
of filters, one Calf low-pass, another Calf high-pass.
## Track: "dryer drone"
This is a recording of the noise my clothes dryer makes, strangely
turned into a kind of chaotic drum-kit track using "C*Scape Stereo
delay with chromatic resonances (by Tim Goetze)" -- that gives it
the weird emergent rythm enhancement, the gorgeous 5 band "Calf
equalizer that I love very much now, and again low and hi pass
filters to give it some place w/in the mix.
## Tracks: "screaming off hook" and "Voicemail..."
This is little more than the off hook signal but shrunk (and so
pitch-raised) -- sounds like a funky ringtone. Some scrap of audio
for the imaingary "pick up" of the phone. And some tinkery with the
"this call is now being recorded" message and some random stuff I
left on voicemail.
## Tracks: "wave tone 1-6 (and bus)"
I again deployed the Calf EQ, a comb filter, etc. along with my
hand-made almost-a-tone from the off hook signal and built... a
chord. Those chime-like noises and chord in the last part of the
piece. The bus has a ring modulator automated to reach a mild
frenzy at the end there. All the final "clinks" which, if you are
old enough, might remind you of those old time flip-top butane
lighters are literal copies of the gun-shot-like pot lid sound but
passed through the filter stacks of the wave tones and the echo-y
voicemail.
## Track: "this call"
Unaltered source material from my voip service. "This call is now
being recorded." Oh, in the second part of the song, you can hear
the "now" part of that recording all stretched out (hence low-pitch)
and treated and deployed with some echo and on-grid-then-off-grid
assault.
## Tracks: "lucky snake"
We made these nonsense calls about birds with grenades vs an unarmed
snake in the neighbors garden. I tripled the recording and applied
a variety of distortions differently to two of the copies to get
some glitch-smudging and some fake triple-tracking going.
Woot.
-t