Jingle Hell (2015). This piece was created using a version of ixiLang that was made (barely) to run with SuperCollider 3.6 on some arrays representing melody, chords and drums for Jingle Bells.
It is available to download via Bandcamp, in exchange for a donation to Crisis, a UK charity working with homeless people.
This particular track is part of a larger album, No Room 2015 and also a larger personal project ’12 days of Crimbo’, which will raise funds for homeless and/or LGBT charities.
![[play]](http://www.berkeleynoise.com/celesteh/images/play.gif){kind=small}
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.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:02 — 1.4MB)
Shorts #33: Birthday Music for Caroline (2014)
Commissioned in honour of Caroline’s birthday – “Happy Birthday, love from Lauren and Alistair”
This was a digital piece using a very large number of scripts. First I wrote a SuperCollider script to generate some stochastic sounds. Then I wrote a script to convert audio files into bmp graphics files. Then I wrote a script to convert those files to jpegs, glitch the jpegs and convert back to audio. Then I also did several revisions of drawing more and more on the images in GIMP to transform them. I ended up with several batch processing scripts to glitch audio using visual data processing. I’ve put some of them on github and the rest will go after I fix some bugs I found after finishing this piece.
After generating loads of material, I listened to it and assembled it as a collage in Ardour.
The images are also kind of interesting! 
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:00 — 1.4MB)
Shorts #32: Stochastic Tendencies (2014)
Commissioned in honour of Paul Berg, who was my teacher at the Institute of Sonology in Den Haag, when I was there for the course in 2006-7.
Paul Berg is the inventor of the AC Toolbox, which allows composers with Macs to do algorithmic sound generation. The class he taught spends the first several weeks covering a very thurough history fo electronic music, before switching to cover how to use several different tools, including AC Toolbox. Paul has decided to retire, so future students, alas, will not get the benefit of this amazing course, which was definitely a highlight of my time in the Hague.
This piece is made on my MOTM Analogue synthesiser, but applies several ideas I would more normally use in digital synthesis. It has random attack times, generated by using a random signal (filtered noise) triggering a switch with a variable threshold. When the random signal exceeds the threshold, the switch sent a bias as a gate to an envelope generator.
This piece also uses a very rough approximation of tendency masks, using a varying lag time for CV voltages that were increasing or decreasing.
It is mixed in Ardour, with some reverb added to the final mix in Audacity.
Because Paul is retiring this year, one of his former students contacted several of Sonologists and asked us to write short pieces to be put into a device called the ‘AC Juke Box’. The only constraint was that the pieces had to be mono!
Paul Berg’s scepticism about multichannel audio is legendary and also makes a valuable point. A musical gesture does not become interesting because it is moving in space. It’s too easy to use spatialisation as a substitute for generating interesting material. Paul’s tools and teaching all were aimed at generating interesting material. I hope this short piece contains some.
This piece is in mono. It also contains low frequencies that may not be audible though the internal speakers on some laptops, so you may wish to use headphones or external speakers to listen.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:01 — 1.4MB)
Shorts #31: 1416343620 (2014)
Commissioned and titled by David Jensenius, who says the title is the unix timestamp of when he received the commission.
This is an acoustic piece, recorded with a zoom and mixed in Ardour. The source sounds are my radiator, my kettle boiling, shoving a running recorder into a plastic bag and finally feedback from when I accidentally told Ardour to do monitoring of the internal microphone to the internal speakers. The feedback timbre is modified by putting my thumbs over the speaker grates. This does not have as much subtlety as the kind of speaker cupping that PowerBooks UnPlugged does with macs and feedback, but it still works.
The plastic bag portion of the sound is influenced by the Fluxus composition Micro 1 by Takehisa Kosugi, “Wrap a live microphone with a very large sheet of paper. Make a tight bundle. Keep the microphone alive for another five minutes”. I highly encourage people to try that out, as it’s surprisingly wonderful.
If you would like to commission a one minute piece, check out my online shop.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:05 — 1.5MB)
Meridian Drums (2013) was premièred at the Meridian Gallery in San Francisco in June 2013. It was made using SuperCollider and some analogue techno synths from the days when MIDI went over MIDI cables. These were the FutureRetro 777 and a Jomox AirBase rackmounted drum machine. The piece was only semi-interactive – I cued some section changes and modified the timbre of the 777 to sound less and less like a TB303.
This piece is available for download via BandCamp, provided you sign a petition supporting Laetita, a Russian LGBT asylum seeker in Sweden, who is still awaiting a final decision in her case.
If you want to support LGBT asylum seekers more generally, there is also a petition to ask Australia to stop deporting all asylum seeks to a country which prosecutes LGBT people.
Shorts: #25 Untitled (2007)
Commissioned and (un)titled by Scott Wilson
I talked today about whether or not he wanted to give me a title, and Scott noted that the piece has a “flatuent quality,” but it would be better to resist referencing that in a title.
To make this piece, I recorded myself playing a bovine signaling horn and a didjeridu, both of which I ran through a Sherman filterbank to use as FX. There’s also a little bit of feedback, especially the very last sounds. Processing a didgeridu turns out to be much more straightforward and easy than processing a cow horn. Something to keep in mind.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:08 — 1.3MB)
Shorts: #26 Ecstatic Rivulet (2007)
Commissioned and titled by Clyde Niesen
For this piece, I wanted to use a field recording that I made while camping over the summer. Visually, the campground looked like it would make a suitable set for a horror movie. The animals were correspondingly loud and screetchy at night and so I made a recording with my cell phone.
I listened to the recording a few times and it made me think of GrainPic, a project that I had intended to abandon. Everything I do with this always sounds kind of rough and unpolished, which is why I stopped working with it. But it seems to fit well with my memory of that campground.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:05 — 1.3MB)