So just how malleable is sound?

 

Studio Noise Manipulated (Death of a Soundcard)

This is an experiment in how malleable sound is today with the use of digital processing. You hear the source content briefly at the start, noise and hum coming from a dying soundcard. That sound is split into narrow bands using a filter bank and each band is then processed differently. As there was a hum element in the original sound it was easy to derive a pitched sound and then further pitch and frequency shift the results.

Spotify https://open.spotify.com/album/2FLG6BH3G5xEM6rEXVxNiY?si=KJG90zY-ToizLslTtEi2GA

Bandcamp Free download https://markdaltongriffiths.bandcamp.com/track/death-of-a-soundcard

 

Murmuration

 

 Now up on Bandcamp as a free download, "Murmuration". Link to Bandcamp

Murmuration is a term applied to flocks of European Starlings that swarm in the autumn/ winter in great swirling masses before rooting. This is often seen on marshland over reed beds and there can be 100,000 birds in the flock. After twisting to and fro the birds suddenly dip into the reeds and disappear for the night.

The piece tries to evoke the still isolation of the marshes with soft sine tones that build to complex tone clusters. The sound of the flock was created in two ways, very fast and dense undulating passages that actually contain tiny snippets of birdsong and a textural element built from many digital oscillators.

Although these flocks are huge, they are smaller than in the past. In the UK starling population has dropped by 80%.   

 

 

Head Noise

The basic material for “Head Noise” came from a set of “private utterances”. The sort of thing no one else hears, a sort of internal monologue of whistles, sighs and breath. The wet clicking and “Ss” are the audio left overs from “tidying up” a piece for spoken word. I used software to find sibilance and mouth pops, but instead of deleting them I kept them and discarded the actual spoken text.

Head Noise on Bandcamp (free download)

Head Noise on Spotify