Category Archives: Noise

First Night

Leave a Reply

Every night of Hanukkah, one more candle is lit than the previous night. This piece, for the first night, is about that one candle burning – one long drone, one sound, changing but constant.

This piece was made in SuperCollider. It is made up of 180 sine waves, each starting at one note in the Ben Johnston’s combined otonal-utonal scale and sliding slowly to another note.

Also per holiday tradition, this is intended as a fundraiser for a worthy cause. Please consider donating to Rainbow Migration. cafdonate.cafonline.org/111#/DonationDetails They support LGBTQI+ people through the UK asylum and immigration process. Their vision is a world where there is equality, dignity, respect and safety for all people in the expression of their sexual or gender identity.

Or, if you are in the US, please donate to the National Center for Transgender Equality secure2.convio.net/ncftge/site/Donation2;jsessionid=00000000.app268b?df_id=1480&mfc_pref=T&1480.donation=form1&NONCE_TOKEN=C5EA18E62F736227261DC4CE5C50ADBE

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 7:12 — 5.4MB)

Shorts #44: November 2024

Leave a Reply
November 2024

This piece titled by Sonia Elks. Artistic feedback from Paula Gazzard.

There’s a principle in psychoacoustics called “stream segregation”. When you listen to somebody playing a lot of notes on the piano, but there’s a clear melody, this is because your brain groups some of the notes together. It “segregates” “streams” of notes by pitch. However, there are only so many streams you can recognise at a time. If you have more than that, the phenomenon is called “wall of noise.” In that case, your brain doesn’t know where the melody is. A constantly changing texture has some voices seem to come to the front and then retreat. No two people hear a wall of noise in the same way.

This piece has 47 different voices of sinusoidal grains. Each voice varies it’s pitch and panning position very slightly with every note. Each note is extremely short, although they do gradually double in average duration and then return to their original lengths. The longer pitches become “glissons”, which is a short sine wave that moves from one pitch to another instead of staying steady. The very end overlaps the 47 granular voices with 47 glissandos.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:04 — 1.2MB)

Shorts #41: Catalyst

Shorts #41: Catalyst. Commissioned and titled by Andy Bannister

This piece was commissioned and titled by Andy Bannister.

Explaining why he picked this title, he said, “My thought process for this, is that the first half sounds like a catalyst for a reaction towards the latter half which could also be interpreted the sound of a substance or object changing state, like liquid to gas etc.”

The time elapsed between the original commission and this post is a lot longer than usual and I can’t remember how the piece was made, but according to my filing system, it was made using chaos synthesis on a Eurorack. This is a type of frequency modulation where oscillator A modulates oscillator B, which modulates oscillator C which modulates oscillator A. This is an exciting system because the feedback makes it chaotic.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:01 — 2.3MB)

Glass

Glass – for Irene’s birthday

This piece was composed using SuperCollider and a synthesiser for Irene’s birthday. It was presented as a part of an installation at the Rupture Gaming Festival in Kent.

The source material is recorded with an analogue modular synthesiser. The SuperCollider program takes that material and granulates it, dramatically changing the playback speed.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:14 — 1.9MB)

The Last Christmas: III Misterioso

The Last Christmas: III Misterioso

As per holiday tradition, I have again produced a Christmas album, although only an EP this year – or a virtual chamber ensemble playing once piece in five movements. This movement is the odd one out, using the same MIDI data for pitch and rhythm as the other movements use. The only sound used, however, is one sample. The same sample appears in all the movements at least once, but in them it is untransformed.

Also per holiday tradition, this is intended as a fundraiser for a worthy cause. Please consider donating to UKLGIG. cafdonate.cafonline.org/111#/DonationDetails They support LGBTQI+ people through the asylum and immigration process. Their vision is a world where there is equality, dignity, respect and safety for all people in the expression of their sexual or gender identity.

Or, if you are in the US, please donate to the National Center for Transgender Equality secure2.convio.net/ncftge/site/Donation2;jsessionid=00000000.app268b?df_id=1480&mfc_pref=T&1480.donation=form1&NONCE_TOKEN=C5EA18E62F736227261DC4CE5C50ADBE

If you are interested in hearing the rest of the album, it’s on bandcamp https://charleshutchins.bandcamp.com/album/the-last-christmas. This movement is my favourite one and the only one I’ll post here, lest this turn into a Christmas podcast. I’ve written a post about how the whole piece was made on my blog.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 3:01 — 7.4MB)

Dick Pic Hymnen

[play] Dick Pic Hymnen (2016)

This piece was commissioned by lesbiancockslut.com [NSFW]

When commissioned, I appealed on twitter for people to send me dick pics. Specifically, encrypted dick picks, to highlight that various national governments are spying on our sexts. In return, I was sent two unecrpyted images and one encrypted one. The unlocked images were of a tin of spotted dick, and a rooster (known to the English as a ‘cock’). The encrypted image was of the sender’s ‘friend, Richard.’

I took these files and played them as if they were wav files. Compressed and encrypted files sound like white noise, so I took the two unencrypted images and converted them to raw image formats. I then converted those to raw audio and used them as samples.

The pitches and rhythms in the piece are taken from a hymn that was popular in American Catholic churches when I was a child.

The images in the video are (obviously) not the images in the audio, as those were of unknown copyright status. The video images come from picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/hJOtwAhiy6I9de3uFZxJUw and ommons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Boxerbriefs.jpg

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:11 — 2.2MB)

CCR76 (1969 / 2015)

[play]Shorts #36: CCR76 (1969 / 2015)

A realisation of Nature Study Notes CCR76 by Cornelius Cardew, commissioned by Stefan Szczelkun.

Nature Study Notes is a collection of 152 different rites, or short text ‘scores’, used by the Scratch Orchestra as a spring board for improvisation. CCR76’s text says, ‘It’s not music. It’s my heart beating.’

For this, piece, I started with the most obvious cue. I downloaded a sample of a heartbeat from Freesound and recorded my coffee grinder, which I felt alluded to a rapid heart rate. Both of these sounds appear with no modification, but the heartbeat sound is also used for amplitude modulation and ring modulation of a FM sweep I coded in SuperCollider. The piece was assembled in Ardour.

This piece was used in the Scratch Orchestra Nature Study Notes performance at Cafe Oto in London on 22 February, 2015. As Stefan only had one speaker, the piece is in mono.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:01 — 1.4MB)

Live at the Hundred Years Gallery (2015)

[play]Live at the Hundred Years Gallery (2015)

This is a live set I played at the Hundred Years Gallery in Hoxton, London in February. Originally, it was going to be a 2 hours set broadcast live on the radio, but this is what it became. This was live-patched, using my MOTM analogue modular synthesiser.

Live patching is a way of performing live, where I go on with a bunch of patch cables around my neck and nothing plugged into the synth. I get sounds going as quick as I can and then change them over the course of performing. For this particular performance, I started with FM chaos. This is good, because it gives a lot of potential variety, however, if I had actually been on for the entire two hours, it would not be all that well-suited to slowly evolving drones.

All the sound here is analogue, but the panning and recording is handled by a program running in SuperCollider.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:45 — 27.1MB)

Shorts #35: Radioactive Wellness (2014)

[play]Shorts #35: Radioactive Wellness (2014)

Commissioned and titled by Chrissie Caulfield.

Chrissie asked me to write something with a radiation theme for her friend, who is having radiotherapy for cancer. I looked into getting a geiger counter, and even found who might lend me one, when I realised I would need a radioactive element in my studio. Also, as I was thinking of what to do with the clicks, I realised I wanted to use them for triggers, so I would need a geiger counter with a line out and everything seemed to be getting overly complex. In the end, I realised chaotic or stochastic noise would sound the same as the effect I wanted, which much less of a chance of accidentally gaining super powers (that’s what happens when you mishandle a radioactive element in your studio / workshop, right?).

In the end, I made this with my MOTM modular synthesiser. The final recipient was reportedly very happy with it.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:04 — 1.5MB)

Shorts #34: Bubbles (2014)

[play]Shorts #34: Bubbles (2014)

Commissioned and titled by Sonia Elks.

Sonia asked me to write an analogue piece that wasn’t glitchy. Very often, I work with FM chaos as a way of controlling pitch and timbre. However, for this piece, I used FM chaos for control voltages only, and not directly for sound. One of the oscillators was controlling pitch of the source signal, one was controlling a high pass filter and one was controlling a low pass filter. For some of the tracks, the filter resonances were turned up very high, so the filters were ringing and acting like oscillators.

This piece seemed a bit poppy, so to further that, I put some compression on the sounds and also a bit of reverb. The source material was from my MOTM synthesiser, edited in ardour and had the final fx applied in audacity.

If you would like to commission a one minute piece, check out my online shop.

Play

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:02 — 1.4MB)