Cinema Volta: Daily Ambience

Same original material once again, but this time at the original tempo. I'm playing around with phase relationships and offsets as well as acoustic resonance. 2005-05-01

This is the long, slow version with a big reverb, the original signal subtracted and a new, transposed version laid on top. Basically what you get is a reverb coming back in a different pitch. 2005-05-02

This is completely slapdash and random with very little involvement on my part, and of course, much more interesting and listenable than things that I slave over for hours. The source material is some of the MIDI tracks from Web Phase. 2005-05-03

Almost the same thing, without the randomness. 2005-05-04

Very sleepy and dreamy. In many cases, I hope that you are able to forget that you are listening to these tracks while you are listening to them. 2005-05-05

I let the computer play with yesterday's track. It's really quite noisy. 2005-05-06

Made with processes similar to yesterday's but much less noisy. 2005-05-07

More experiments in automated music. I set up the initial conditions with just a sine wave triggering everything. This one was done with a whole stack of Pluggo plugins feeding each other. I just have to step out of the way and let them do their thing. 2005-05-08

Continuing in the same vein. I took yesterdays track and used it as the source material for the feedback machine I created. I tweaked the parameters a bit and came up with this. My wife thinks it sounds like a Doctor Who soundtrack. 2005-05-09

Same process as yesterday, using yesterday's track as the trigger, with another moving filter and a reverb added. 2005-05-10

For those of you who live in Sweden, Denmark, Norway or Switzerland, Apple's iTunes Music store is now available to you. This means that you can buy Cinema Volta albums online. If you live in Switzerland, it also means you can get one free song.

Continuing with the feedback machine process. This time there's a slight difference. I used yesterday's track as the source for the feedback, but this time set up the feedback machine as a send instead of as an insert, so you can still hear the original track beneath the new sounds. 2005-05-11

Similar processes to the last few, but no feedback this time. There's delay lines and moving filters. Amazing to think that this all began with a simple sine wave. 2005-05-12

A big thanks to the person who sent a donation yesterday.

I reintroduced the feedback machine with a few modulation and panning twists. I think I've taken this path as far as I can at the moment. Tomorrow - the return of the long wooden tube! 2005-05-13

As promised yesterday, the dijeridoo makes a return appearance, this time sent through the feedback machine and a whole bunch of frequency and spectral processors. 2005-05-14

This project is now one quarter of the way through. To celebrate that, I morphed two of my favorite tracks so far. Can you guess which two they are? 2005-05-15

Just a big wash of sound. Press play, sit back, relax and ignore it. 2005-05-16

One of the fun things about doing recursive processes in the old analog tape world was discovering the interesting sound quality that would arise from the generation loss as you bounced the signal from tape to tape. This doesn't really happen in the digital world, where copies are perfect. One thing that I have been doing during this project is using the MP3 files as the source material, so as we progress through generations of encoding and decoding, there is the introduction of a few artifacts.

I think this track is beginning to show some of the effects of generation loss. I kind of like it. 2005-05-17

I did this track with Garageband, which is a truly amazing program that I wish was available when I was 16 years old. I'm still pretty happy to have it now.

Garageband does a great job of pulling everything into line, matching tempos, keys and phrases. I've worked quite hard to create something that feels quite disorganized from it. 2005-05-18

This is a very old fashioned type of track for me. 2005-05-19

Here's a variation on yesterday's. Strings instead of piano and now it's in just intonation. 2005-05-20

Took yesterday's track, cut the tempo in half and stuck it underwater. 2005-05-21

A big thank you to the latest contributer for the very generous donation.

This is a very rough, quick sketch for something that needs to be explored further. I've created a whole set of effects that are only triggered when the didjeridoo goes above a certain volume. There's a lot more that can be done with this approach. 2005-05-22

I expanded on yesterday's idea. This time, the audio signal from the didjeridoo is being used to control a number of the effects parameters. So, as the playing gets more active, so do the effects. 2005-05-23

Another didjeridoo track using the same system as yesterday. This time it's controlling the parameters of a different set of effects. I think the control signal to result process is a little more apparent in this one. 2005-05-24

By the way, this is the 100th track so far.

Still traveling down the same river here. I took yesterday's didjeridoo recording and added a more processing, using the sound to control even more parameters. I'm working on getting this setup to work more smoothly and responsively - I think there's some potential buried in here somewhere. 2005-05-25

Instead of working from a technique or a set of sounds that interested me, I set out to create a track that reflected my mood today, using fairly traditional means - no tricky effects or patches, just some standard sounds and a little bit of reverb. This is sort of a canon and does a good job of expressing how I feel at the moment. 2005-05-26

A variation on yesterday. By making it slower and changing the voices, some of the intervals and the tuning, it doesn't feel as sad. 2005-05-27

Just taking this through a number of different mutations. 2005-05-28

Today's version 2005-05-29

Moving in the direction of a piano. 2005-05-30

Moving over to piano 2005-05-30