I love eddies in streams because, while it’s possible to point them out and label them as if they’re things (”Look at that eddy”), they’re obviously just transient patterns in a flow of water. I like their not-really-there-at-allness, because I’m sure that everything else is also a sort of vortex, a transient, temporarily self-sustaining pattern of matter-energetic flow which spins together and then dissipates.
Looking through some old camcorder tape, I found this footage of a trip down to our local river on a sunny winter day, when I found a quiet stretch of water where the sunlight showed “shadows” of the eddies, and I could watch them spinning past.
While I was filming, a mother and her child walked by and the boy asked me what I was doing – the conversation’s caught on the soundtrack.
I had a little play around in Reaktor last week, after a long break. A post on the forum set me off, a guy called Ned Rush asking about how to get reverb feeding back into itself.
My idea was an instrument which makes sound by listening to the unplugged inputs of the computer’s soundcard (just listening to very, very quiet hiss), then feeds that back on itself; it also listens to the loudness of its output, turning the feedback down if it’s getting too loud, and up if it’s dying away altogether. I dropped a couple of filters into the loop too, to colour the sound.
What’s nice about the idea is that it’s negative feedback:
Output too loud? Turn it down. Output too quiet? Turn it up.
Which controls positive feedback:
Apply reverb to input. Send some of the output back to the input.
What I didn’t quite expect was how beautiful it would sound:
It’s a little loud at the beginning, but after a quick tweak of its sensitivity to loud signals, it began to produce a rolling flow of gorgeous harmonics, which even managed to sound musical every so often.
So when there’s another window of sound design opportunity, I think I’ll have another play with it.
On my way back from London, jumping off a tram in Croydon town centre, I came across a street-scene: a man throwing pots and kitchen utensils from a 3rd-floor window at loud, late-night drunks in the street below. Continue Reading »