Clay Bells (disquiet0284) by Nate Trier

This week's assignment was to remix a performance of clay bells, but to do the remix without adding any additional sounds and to reinforce the concept of circularity.

I revisited my interest in mensural canons, which are canons in which the different voices mimic the melody at different (proportional) speeds. I found a fairly active part of the source audio, isolated it, made it twice as slow, then reversed it. This became the foundation of the piece. Then I left in the original audio, but made it happen twice (since I now had twice as much space to fill). I also "un-reversed" the original sample. Then I made the original sample play twice as fast and happen four times.

This gave me some pretty good material - the slowed-down sample provided a lovely drone that underpins the piece (in fact the drone reminded me a bit of Brian Eno's Music for Airports). It was still a little busy, though, so I calculated several Golden Mean points and then adjusted different sections so something interesting would happen at golden mean points (in doing so, I messed up the perfect proportions of the mensural canon, but all's fair in love and art). The "something interesting" usually meant striking a bell, but sometimes it meant the section would go silent.

From there, I heard more tones emerging, so I used Ableton's Spectrum resonator to figure out what pitches were resonating, and then reinforced them with Ableton's Resonator plug-in.

Then, in keeping with the "circular" concept of the assignment, I added some auto-filters that slowly creep around each audio track's strongest frequencies - the idea being to occasionally lessen their strongest character and make their return more interesting. I also added some phaser and flanger. At a couple of times you can hear the feedback from the flanger, but since it goes down and then up, that seemed appropriately circular.

Then applied compression and limiting as need be.

I didn't think I was going to be able to get this remix done this week, but I'm pretty happy with the results and glad I snuck it in!

More on this 284th weekly Disquiet Junto project — “Creative Commonfield: Make ambient music from the sound of clay bowls. — at:

https://disquiet.com/0284/

More on the Disquiet Junto at:

https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements here:

http://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co:

https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0284-creative-commonfield/

There’s also on a Junto Slack. Send your email address to twitter.com/disquiet for Slack inclusion.

Image courtesy of fraenkelgallery.com and the artist Chris Kallmyer, who created the bowls and the source audio. More from Kallmyer at:

http://www.chriskallmyer.com/