objects thats make strange sounds for music concrete

[JGriffin]

I spend hours feeding my two old digital reverbs into each other, just bringing the faders up and down, changing the delay time to warp the sound currently in the buffer, and then feed it through my newer digitial DSP and morph it some more. No real instruments are used/harmed in this

It makes for good repetitive soundscapey type stuff, with a beat going on if you get a feedback peak right, but it's not very repeatable, or IMHO interesting enough to record.

I once fed a Sonic Solutions DAW back into itself and brought it up on a console, and I found by playing with the sweepable EQ I could change the pitch of the feedback, and play little melodies with the EQ Frequency knob. I put a compressor on the DAW output so it wouldn't get too out of control, and fed it through a bit of reverb. That was fun. parts of that made it onto the Donny CD.

[Knights Who Say Neve]

More Ideas (I love this thread)-

Use crap microphones. One of the best for this is a carbon mic from an old-style telephone handset. You can drop them into stuff and play the outside as somesone else suggested. I used to mic an "air organ" (you know, it has a fan and when you press the keys it allows air to flow over a reed) with a carbon mic and run it thru a nanoverb for lovely Neil Young Caught in a Wind Tunnel effects.

Use crap processors. The grainy reverb of a nanoverb, Zoom 1201, Boss se50, etc. adds intresting texture. You can feed these into each other as someone else said, and also abuse these by feeding tham too much signal, and than lowering the output volume, to overload the unit, or do the reverse for a sort of bit-reduction effect. Just do the opposite of Good Gain Structure.

Feedback- it is your friend. Bring stuff back into an input channel on the board and experiment with feeding it back out.

I realize that I'm sorta heading into the Dub zone with some of these ideas but why not? It's not like Iannis Xenakis is going to throw a jar of olives at you.

[underthebigtree]

Ah! It's great to see that everything old is indeed new again. Cool to read through this thread and see how the masters names are being spread to new folks who haven't heard about them before.

The originators of musique concrete (Pierre Henry, Pierre Schafer, Stockhausen, Edgard Varese, many others) are truly the grandfathers of modern electronic music. Add to that list those who were first experimenting with tape music (John Cage immediately springs to mind), as well as the synth masters from the 60's (Morton Subotnick, Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros, Walter/Wendy Carlos, so many others), and you realize that we truly stand on the shoulders of giants.

So much great listening out there - personal faves include:
Musique Concrete:
Variations on a Door and Sigh (Pierre Henry)
Poeme Electronique (Edgard Varese)
Gesang Der Junglinge (Karlheinz Stockhausen)

Tape Music:
It's Gonna Rain (Steve Reich)
A Rainbow in Curved Air (Terry Riley)
Any tape cutup/reassemble work by John Cage

Synth Music:
Silver Apples of the Moon (Morton Subotnick)
the Nonesuch guide to Electronic Music (Beaver and Krause, etc)
Switched on Bach, etc (Walter/Wendy Carlos)

Finally -
My suggestion for generating materials for true musique concrete is to use a field recorder, go out into the world, and get sounds. Record anything. You will learn an incredible amount that way. Church bells, door closes, water fountains, car bys - the entire world becomes your sonic oyster.

As a challenge, once you find this material, take it home and try to use it in a semi-unadulterated state. Think about how you can juxtapose recorded materials against each other based on their raw timbres or perhaps semantic content.

I've worked seriously in this genre on and off for the last 18 years or so. Personally, I found that editing and splicing the material using analog open reel decks was the most exciting and physical way to approach this type of music. You are limited in what you can do to varying the materials pitch and time together, flipping it backwards, and processing via a mixer while re-recording to another deck. Like in so many other genres of music, it seems to me that working with plug-ins and endless boxes gives you too much variability, too many options, too many ways to remove the sounds from their original state. Your mileage may vary, of course.

I have most of a new, 52-minute piece of musique concrete completed. To combine the best of the digital realm with the best of the analog, I ended up tracking everything to a Revox PR99 1/4" deck, then created tape loops and other manipulations of the material in the analog realm, tracking the results into Pro Tools. I'm now thinking of premixing my PT session, then laying it back to analog again, leaving open analog tracks to lay down more stuff before final mix.

I don't know where you are located, but the San Francisco Bay Area has an incredible wealth of electronic music history - between the San Francisco Tape Music Center (early 60's), San Francisco State University, CNMAT at UC Berkeley, CCRMA at Stanford, and the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Oakland, there is a huge brain trust of love and respect for this stuff among the academic community.

[JGriffin]

it's precisely that history of innovators that makes me call the Donny Who Loved Bowling stuff I do garage-experimental. I don't dare presume to put myself up with those people--I'd laugh myself out of the room!

...I'm gonna go listen to Ballet Mecanique and go to sleep.

[Rigsby]

Some recent goodies:

Cymbals played with violin bows.

Playing cymbals lightly with a beater - contact mic on the cymbal, playing out through speakers in a railway arch, recorded to minidisc.

Wood panels that surround trees to protect them - they all have a different tone and pitch, played with beaters, recorded to MD. fencing can work the same.

Last night my friend and i were improvising and my girlfriend came in and took us downstairs to the rubbish area under our building. It was empty except for this little plastic keyboard joined to a stand sitting on the floor that was unplugged but emmitting this strange whirring/moaning sound. I walked around and in and out of the area with the MD mic and the playback is awesome, you'll have to wait to hear it though, as i'm using it on my record.

Bag of those little polystyrene packing pieces, played by rummaging through with your fingers - another one from my girlfriend.

The washing machine - sounds like rain.

Recorded a stir fry a few weeks ago, the closer you get with the mic, the higher the frequency. Kind of sounds like low TV static. That'll be on the record too.

I love all this stuff.

[joel hamilton]

The movie is (in english) "Savage planet" or Le planet sauvage (sp?) in french.

We have that record at the studio, it is amazing.

I have gotten into concret stuff and just recorded a pal of mine who was using sand, and rice, and lentils, and all sorts of grains dropping on various surfaces. So fun. We used a pair of Schoeps he has and my manley pre, and some syteks, and a grace designs thing before that. Nothing like really quiet things gained up like crazy. The art of the surreal.

I also like the people that simply tried a bunch of pasive components to see what they did to audio, like diodes, transformers, and capacitors, and resistors. Just running audio through certain simple devices and gaining it up on the other end. Running audio through fully homebrew alligator clipped together signal chains.

Found audio, spliced together is fun, but the remanipulation of audio when treated like energy rather than content can be pretty amazing. Think of the signal as electricity (it is) and see what electrical devices do something fun to your end result, which is audio of course..

[I'm Painting Again]

anybody ever see the x-files with the Jesus bowl (i think it was a bowl or maybe it was something else) and when the nerd dudes analized its natural resonance it was special..not to be increadably cheezy but i do believe certain objects and geometries are in fact acousically special..like i have this old Chineese bowl that rings amazingly when you strike it..

[tylernolan]

I've always liked the sound of reverb tanks being banged around, glass breaking through a delay, any manipulated field recordings or found sounds.

[Zeppelin4Life]

THERAMINS!!!


here are some cool ideas

-Fire house voluenteer sirens
-aircraft
-sandpaper and a block of wood
-brake drums (literally, from the car)
-placing a mic near a heat duct can simulate 'wind' in the microphone.this is a really cool 1 if done right
-pots and pans!!!!

my friend had a song called 'SS Sammy' where the singer was blowing bubbles in a tub. the line was like 'so the ship sank, and we all drowned.yes *we all drowned* and that him with his head in the water...ok dont try this with +48V

[I'm Painting Again]

oh and the best thing about it is when i strike the bowl 3 times i turn into a dragon that can shoot lightning..

[Brett Siler]

GREAT THREAD!

Old tape and early electronic music is soo cool. I really want to start experimenting with tape loops. How did you guys learn how to do tape looping?

Anyway ever citcuit bend any thing? That can give you some pretty chaotic and new sounds. www.sk-1.org

[somniferum]

I just wanted to thank everyone who has posted on this thread. As usual, very informative and intriguing. As far as stuff that makes cool sounds (not necessarily for music concrete), I really like experimenting with different objects (empty glass bottles, tape cases, etc) as "slides" on guitar. It sounds real cool if you use a delay pedal. I also used a cheap Panasonic boombox with a built in mic to record the Cicadas this past summer. Using the cheap recorder gave it lots of tape hiss which added a nice ambient wash to the recording. I plan on using it on one of the dark ambient/soundscape tracks for my band. I've heard using those metal thimbles for sewing on guitar sounds cool. I keep having the idea of micing an instrument (clean electric guitar amp, or bass amp maybe) with a mic placed in a glass fishbowl, but would this damage the mic at all?

[apropos of nothing]

You can get weird noises anywhere. As a matter of fact the great likelihood is that can't hear them often because they are so ubiquitous that they have tuned them out. Start listening and start listening with a digital walkman at your side, and you'll hear all kinds of them.

If one is feeling especially lazy, one could also check this google search:
http://www.google.com/search?q=quote+mp3


I got a cassette tape from a truck-stop/gas-station in the middle of nowheresville North Carolina. The tape was titled, "How to Survive a Terrorist Attack." (the answer is simple: everlasting life through Jesus Christ, of course.) But this preacher guy has the most hystrical drawl. I absolutely had to use it. Not that there's anything wrong with drawls, mind you. But this dude's was especially comic.

I'm also a sucker for filters. I've been using arpeggiated filters on my Ion for rhythmic amplitude shaping. Its pretty hip. Any sound run through a repeating envelope starts to sound as if it is in rhythm.

My piano is open right now, so I played around with plucking the strings on that, and filtered that as previously mentioned. The result sounds like this:
http://www.unc.edu/~jkidder/samples/yapaysyer3bill.mp3

I've been really liking setting up my synths to be played not traditionally with the keyboard but with the front panel controls and hooking them together the systems and having them modify one another.
I did a whole post on my journal about that, recently.

[Rigsby]

You can get weird noises anywhere.

You can find music anywhere. Everything makes a sound. There's that arguement with art, that it's not the piece itself, it's the context, so a kettle in a kitchen is a kettle, but a kettle in a gallery is art, translate that and you could argue that anything you record or perform is music because you give it that context. I think i'm arguing this.