My favourite audio effect is a gate and playing with the threshold brings out dynamics in parts.
However, a friend on Facebook named Hurricane Bestman recently prompted a discussion of signal treatment that I think is worth considering:
Communication is imperfect. What’s being offered and what’s received don’t always match.
Borrowing from my recent toe-dipping into the world of audio engineering, I’ve installed a few new signal-processing tools for navigating life:
Two knobs and a fader.
The first knob is labelled FEEDBACK.
Feedback can be useful. It can help us understand how we’re being perceived, including the moments when that perception doesn’t align with our own sense of self.
There is, of course, another kind of feedback.
When a microphone passes in front of a speaker and creates a loop of increasingly ugly NOISE.
When that happens, I’m learning to reach for the feedback knob and turn it down a little.
Beside it is another knob labelled SENSITIVITY. Sometimes that one can come down a touch too.
And while I was installing the new equipment, I added a fader labelled SELF-LOVE.
Somewhat magically, as the feedback and sensitivity come down, I’ve noticed the self-love fader creeping up.
Discerning what is your shit and what belongs to somebody else is a lifelong practice.
I’m feeling a little more ease navigating it with these new tools
The assignment is to "Use audio of a light bulb to express the pervasiveness of energy."
Musikfestival Bern shared an audio sample by musician and media artist Michael Vorfeld, which I manipulated and then added video from a Chocolate Factory fire in Marrickville.
The Junto assignment this week is to "Play into the distraction."
My Sunday morning routine includes watching ABC's Insiders program about Australian politics, which this week featured a distraction in the form of discussion of the Prime Minister's appearance on a podcast.
I should declare at this point that I have never subscribed to a podcast and don't understand why I would want to listen to such inanities, particularly when a transcription can be consumed much quicker.
As the venerable Fourth Estate disappears with the loss of journalism, and takes with it the important function of digesting policy and presenting a range of views rather than regurgitating press releases, we're left with mindless entertainment such as social media rushing into the vacuum.
An example of the inanity of this situation was provided in the distraction that followed Anthony Albanese's admission that he fancied Kylie Minogue, which is surprising because I think it would unAustralian to say one doesn't admire her contributions to popular culture that continue over decades.
So I found myself playing the blues as the esteemed journalists on the Insiders couch discussed the depths plumbed by the Prime Minister as a range of other significant policy discussions were disregarded without any acknowledgement of Ms Minogue's undeniable sex appeal.
The simple binary effect of opening and closing a signal is one at the start of production for me.
In my remixing of playgrounds it was a way to isolate tones, then manipulate them.
Those
lingering metal notes from old slides, in particular, became so much
more usable with this approach before pitching them into key and adding
delay or reverb.
When I moved to recording
drums the gates became a way to remove the room sound, before adding a
studio reverb modelled on a more famous room.
One
of the most creative ways I've used gates was to run a sequencer through a crossover, then have the kick open a pitched-down treatment
while the hats opened a pitched up one.
I would
strum a chord and suddenly a bassline would pulse while a rhythmic
urgency pulsed, giving my simple playing a feeling like making live
techno.
Then I got
interested in how Rainger FX had used a gate in a range of pedals to
make the effect part of expression in my playing.
It
prompted me to look at the pedals I had that weren't being used with
new eyes and the B pedal board suddenly became the one I was using the
most.
Now I looking at the range of stutter
effects and wondering how even more variety can be incorporated,
especially now I'm thinking about a pedal board for a double-neck
instrument.
I can't believe there aren't more
guitar pedals with a crossover effect, but then again, I'm also
surprised there aren't more using gates.
I think it's the most audacious instrument that I've seen in years, with the resonant strings crossing over all those extra pickups.
It gives me hope that something as much as a mainstay as the Stratocaster design can still develop, because so much of contemporary culture seems stuck looking backwards.
And it reminds me there are a pile of pickguards and guitar bodies that are waiting for me to do something different.
The assignment this week is to "Interpret [a] gauzy window treatment as an audio effect."
My first impulse was to record the guitar set-up I recently plugged together that uses a Chase Bliss Audio Lossy pedal, but my kids are home and I haven't much opportunity to jam to arrive at something worth recording.
So I wasn't sure I'd respond to the Junto, until I watched Hamnet with my daughter last night.
There's a moment after the death of the titular character where he's shown beyond veil of death and it's literally filmed through a dark piece of cloth.
(Hopefully that's not a spoiler for anyone but, frankly, if you didn't already know that the death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet has been thought to have contributed to his play Hamlet then it's probably not a film you'll be watching anyway!)
This led me to ponder whether the window gauze might be something more than a filter or a gate?
Also, this morning my Facebook Memories included the Junto track Beatin' Leeton from six years ago that I thought would be good material to manipulate.
From there my idea was that going beyond the veil in this case is to use Ableton Live's convert to MIDI functions as a way to go beyond the audio tracks, with bass and drum parts generated with those transcriptions being fed into arpeggiators as well as the aforementioned effects.
I prefer the idea that music was how oral communication developed among early peoples and there are a range of bonding aspects when people share music through singing and dancing that are useful to exploit in classrooms, for example.
Susan Rogers, a recording engineer turned academic, once said to me that the future of music lies in timbre, which is where the abstract notion of notes becomes so much more engaging through the inflections of instruments and the memories they create and prompt.
The Junto assignment this week comes from my photo with the direction "Combine two tracks."
A couple of weeks ago, after Marc posted Junto 753 interpreting the
traffic sign, I was walking to the shops and pondered the "two tracks"
message on the Give Way sign outside the Leeton Rice Mill.
So
I sent it to Marc as a suggestion for a Junto and we considered
options, with me promoting a broad interpretation that ranged from
literally having two tracks giving way to each other through to arguing a
Wayne's World-esque "Way!" could also be valid.
In that discussion I also noted that
in the USA a "give way" sign is phrased as "yield" and knew it would
appeal to Marc, because I think one of the fun aspects of the Junto
community are those little insights one gains into other's lives and our locations in this small world we share.
The
various meanings of the word "yield" have become more significant in my
interpretation, which should become apparent by the end of this
reflection.
At the time I resisted pointing out
how the "two tracks" message is erroneous, as a railway track uses two
rails and this particular site has two railway tracks that the road
crosses, which became part of the interpretation that ended up informing
my track for this prompt by using four tracks.
So it's two tracks combined, giving way to another two tracks combined.
Since my exchange with Marc I noticed this Junto project would be my 500th video responding to a weekly prompt from Disquiet.
It's a surprising number, but the biglyness reflects how much enjoyment I've gained from these activities over the years.
Yesterday
I thought I'd look over my playlist and see what suggested itself for
the activity this week, finding a few things that seemed relevant to the
location.
The first is a recording made from
close to the site of the Give Way sign that responded to a
project proposed by my compatriot and sometime fellow Cyclic Defrost contributor, Kate Carr.
That
was Junto number 218, and my video shows the Rice Cooperative site that
adds a distinctive hum through most of the year in my town of Leeton,
New South Wales.
Rice is the crop that secured a
future for the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area, where Leeton was planned
as an administrative centre, and it was proposed by the manager of the
fruit cannery who the road Brady Way is named for.
Around
the site of the Give Way sign the road Brady Way becomes Railway Avenue, and
then later becomes Oak Street around where a bridge crosses the tracks,
but none of this is very clear and that's another surprising thing
about the location.
I often think this area in
front of the Rice Cooperative is one of the wildest roads I've driven,
because when you turn the corner you can be travelling at 60km/h and be
confronted by a long freight train in your path or sometimes a B-triple truck on the wrong side
of the road as it turns out from the weighbridge.
You will also find trucks parked
wherever they please, including in the area between the two train tracks opposite to the old cindercrete railway station.
It
really surprises me that the road traffic authority haven't taken more
interest in this area, but I suspect the local council realise that it
would impact on the travel of residents as well as the traffic
servicing the Coop.
By the way, you might sometimes eat
some of the products from this site, as it's marketed as Sunrice and is a
significant Australian brand with a corporate headquarters in town too.
Anyway, the
second of my two tracks is 'Riverside' from Junto 284 and I think I
remember that involved manipulating samples made from an artist working
with river-based clay.
At that time I'd been
reflecting in a soundtrack for an exhibition how the local Murrumbidgee River is part of exports with the industrial agriculture in our region, and thought to
illustrate my track with water escaping from the Coop on a cool night.
The next two tracks used this week are also from Junto projects and there are few ways that the first two give way as I
used a variety of filtering techniques, including EQ and sidechain
compression, as well as effects from Goodhertz and Unfiltered Audio.
These are automated to increase throughout the transition.
The
drums were taken from an early of iteration of the Junto trio projects, number 429, and a personal favourite as they prompted a wonderful spoken response from the poet Sam
Knot.
The footage of the train travelling
through the next railway crossing heading east from the one outside the
Coop came from a self-initiated project I started in 2011 to celebrate
the centenary of Leeton, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVL_ObzijcM
That video from Ramponi Park was used in Junto project 635, which I think might have
been a direction to use a field recording to give shape to a musical
composition.
In
hindsight, those tracks I made manipulating contact mic recordings of
playgrounds were one of my formative experiences as a musician, and also
reflected in my first Junto video for project 29. (Although, surprising in retrospect,
at the time I wasn't sure it was appropriate and didn't publish it until years later).
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxGVrTKfylE
The
decision to work with video developed into the "For 100 Years" album
and a series of screenings that I held, with some of that material
contributing to exhibitions at the Griffith Regional Art Gallery in 2019
and Wagga Wagga Art Gallery in 2020.
Recently I
asked ChatGPT what it knew about the artist Jason Richardson from Leeton and the discussion became skewed toward my electroacoustic work, which was innovative enough to gain the most interest online I guess.
Sorry, I seem to have rambled on, but it's been interesting for me to connect a few observations to coincide with this project.
The
Junto is a significant part of my creative practices and I really
appreciate the inspiration it has provided, especially now that I look
back and see it constitutes around half of the material I've published
on Youtube in the last two decades and that's likely a similar ratio in my releases on Bandcamp too.
And, for the bonus task that I also proposed to Marc, here's a modified road sign that amused me around the time I moved to the Riverina nearly 25 years ago.
Wish I knew which Charles Sturt University student created it, but it's been adopted for my senryu-style blog: Zen Roo.
