Sight Word Sound

Sound

Gallery of sound experiments, songs, and found audio

This page has been updated, primarily to reflect changes in the titles of some of the pieces. As I continue to work on some of them, the working titles change. Also, I still hope to post many things from the last 25 years of experimenting. Getting to all that, while trying to work on new stuff, photography, parenting, etc., has been challenging. But hope still lingers.

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A first four things here are from a number experiments coming together as a set of electronic pieces. The titles are taken from works by the famous alchemical physician Paracelsus. I realize the whole “alchemy” allusion for electronic music is rather tired, but I couldn’t help myself as I was reading the book, and really liked the titles. This first piece is the first 3min 49sec of an 18 minute piece from 2007. It is the result of working with the sound generation plugins in the open source audio application Audacity.

• Astronomia Magna

The  next two pieces are created almost completely in thOnk_0+2 , which was a granular synthesizer of sorts from Audio Ease that takes any audio input you give it and outputs a crazy, flowing, fine-grained stream of samples that form new waveforms. It’s freeware that runs on Mac OS 9. I really love this app, which means I’ll have to keep an old mac that runs Classic around. That is, unless someone (please!) updates or writes something similar for OS X.6.

• Archidoxis Magica part 1
• Archidoxis Magica part 2

The next track is a quick mix of an ambient thing that’s been around for a couple years. It needs plenty of work, but I thought I’d share a work-in-progress mix.

• Liber Prologi in Vitam Beatam

This piece was created in collaboration with Mike Mogan in the late 80′s. I am not sure of the year; I didn’t keep detailed records. It was recorded on a Tascam 4-track cassette recorder. Instrumentation was Mike on electric guitar and synthesizer. I played electric and acoustic 12-string guitar, and did drum machine programming. It was my first drum machine, the E-mu Drumulator. This thing came with a stock set of sounds that was a basic drum kit. Eventually, you could add, I should say change, sounds by actually swapping out the computer chips onto which the sounds were recorded. Here I have the ethnic percussion chip set going.

• Extracting the Root