It’s hard not to be an electronic musician without developing a fascination with random/stochastic processes as a compositional tool. Particularly because when you pay attention to e.g. a Max Roach Drum Solo he seems to be balancing random choices with intentional ones. While Roach knows what he wants in broad outlines, part of what makes his playing great is that he has learned to simply allow his muscle memory and hind brain take over and introduce surprises. By letting go of a score and conscious control he’s participating in randomness shaped by his will.

Max spent a lifetime developing the skills as a musician to allow this sort of freedom in his playing. This demonstration clip is what happens when you set up many random Max For Live LFOs to modulate many, many different things. At the core, LFOs are modulating the Repeat and Grid parameters of a Beat Repeat effect. Then two more LFOS modulate the effect send levels, going to a reverb and delay. A third LFO is modulating the rate of the LFO modulating the Repeat parameters.

Then more LFOs modulate the regeneration level and ‘echo reverse’ parameters of the delay, and the size and predelay on the reverb.

One drum loop is the sole audio source for this. All this modulation introduces a currently fashionable sort of crackle where changing parameters introduces audio discontinuities.

Christopher Hipgrave’s Ambient is a piece of software distributed by Audiobulb.

Ambient is based around granular synthesis of any audio file. It’s pitch shifted, delayed and filtered, and there are several controls you can tweak to control the sound, though ‘explore’ probably makes more sense in this context than ‘control.’

But it’s definitely worth 10 Eu especially if you aren’t a musician, but want to play with a cool audio toy — load anything and then fiddle with knobs, or just hit the random button for hours of crazy sounding fun.

It’s not perfect — there isn’t any way to map the knobs to midi, and the design of the user interface encourages exploration over purposeful control. It also has a tendency to turn any input into 100 buskers playing at the same time in the Berlin Hauptbahnhof. But it is a lot of fun — something you could turn a 5 year old loose on and they’d have a blast.

Quarry Process

This is Amibient chewing up a version of Meredith Monk’s Quarry Weave, as arranged by me using ImageLine Harmless as a sound source. It sounds like part of a the soundtrack for a Wim Wenders movie to me:
Download audio file (Chaircrusher-QuarryProcess.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/Chaircrusher-QuarryProcess.mp3

Quarry Weave

The source audio fed into Ambient:
Download audio file (MeredithMonk-QuarryWeave-ChaircrusherInstrmntl.mp3)
http://www.cornwarning.com/chaircrusher/MeredithMonk-QuarryWeave-ChaircrusherInstrmntl.mp3

Recorded these for a guy here at the University, but there’s nothing proprietary about them, so hey, let’s share?

All files here.