Texture Study II: Plastic Jungle
By Suhpos on March 3, 2024 11:54 pm
Description was added later
This week i started with the idea of making a track using only objects made of plastic and i wanted 100 tracks haha, which i wrote down on the table, in order to ensure that i would actually do it... i didn't, but i kept the title. This is the second edition of texture study, which officially makes it a series (i noticed it was four weeks since the last one so maybe it will be a monthly thing (if inspiration strikes)).
Process notes:
The first sound is 5 tracks of a plastic pen cap which i used as kind of whistle pan pipe type thing to make various "bird" sounds then it was heavily distorted and i put delay to test how it would sound when i had recorded all the tracks, I ended up just using the delayed version to avoid the work haha.
The second sound was 20 tracks of pouring water from beaker into a bowl. I did it for around a minute for each track, when turned out to be quite an interesting process: press record, slowly pour water into the bowl, then stop and pour the water back again, then repeat. felt kind of "zen" to do it. I ended up arranging the tracks so they would come in one after another, panned in consecutive spots in the stereo image. I really like how the stereo field turned out on this sound.
The third sound was 20 tracks a of small piece of wood held at the edge of the table, plucked and moved around to change the pitch. I like how when this sound was filtered low pass it kind of sounds like drips and kind of merges with the water sound and when the high frequencies come out, it detaches and becomes it's own thing. I think this interaction was the biggest success of this "study".
The fourth sound was a plastic bottle blown across, and each track i poured just a little water into it to see what it sounds like when you have a bunch of notes very close to each other in pitch playing simultaneously, because i really wasn't sure. I did 2 versions of this one with 10 tracks and one with 20. I used both in the end. i found it a bit hard blending this sound in with the others, especially because the first compositional idea was just to have each sound playing once in a sequence and then the end. but I didn't like this sound to much on it's own. so i brought all the sound back in the ending which i think kind of worked, but could definitely have spent more time blending all the sounds.
Anyways, it's quite interesting to compose with textures, also to have it as principle when composing "this is going to be a textural piece", because what really qualifies? Is a chord a texture? is a melody? In this track there are examples approaching both, but i choose to call them textures? Maybe it's in the way you listen? maybe there is no such thing as a texture? music?...
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial No Derivative Works (BY-NC-ND)