One of my biggest fascinations over the past year or so has been the sounds of cities — how they sound in certain neighborhoods at night, what the unique textures are, what makes natives feel at home and what disorients visitors. Specifically, I’ve been interested in generating songs from street noise, kinda the opposite of what I did with my Concrete Crickets project. Fortunately, Metaforms has given me an excuse to tinker with that, and here’s the outcome:
It’s based largely on a few patches I’d smashed together, mostly Snot Wong’s Toilet patch, where he sampled breaking things and created a rhythm from them. The end result lets me push in one of four audio samples I’d taken from running under and around some of the varying scaffolding setups and mutilate them, creating looping sections. If timed right, the sections make for a great morphing ambient background, rhythmic and complex. I can also run parts of it through a resonating filter, which basically lets me use city sounds as a sub-bass track.
Here’s a track of said patch in use: scaffold_patch.mp3
And the actual patch itself is here.
The city, it turns out, makes for a mean drum machine and sound generator. I’m still kinda crappy with Max/MSP, but if the assignments continue to fall this way, I’ll have a bunch of reasons to keep experimenting. I’m hoping to get some more usable clips together soon, and build actual songs off that foundation.
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