My most recent musical endeavor takes the form of Mental Tensile; A song that was made entirely out of samples curated by the rad folks at glitch.cool. A lot of my favorite music that I've made tends to result out of a heavy constraint of some kind. In the case of MT, only using samples from the sample pack turned out to be quite the interesting challenge because there wasn't too much obvious melodic content available. Thus, getting a bit funky and creative was a necessity to finish the song. I really like this mentality of pushing past a self imposed adversity. I think it really gives a lot to think about and experiment with. It also prevents myself from going too far back into design patterns and patches that I've been accumulating over the years resulting in something that I consider to feel fresh and new.
Before that, I had worked on a song that was made entirely out of manipulating a single splashing water sample. [The song is named Watari Watson if you wanna give it a peep; Link below]. I think that this song (among a few more I've made) really encapsulates my favorite aspect of music: Texture! You'll catch me adding various foley clicks, drags, twisting basses, cracked out 808's, and a LOT of splashing noises to almost every track I work on. I think texture is so important in electronic music production specifically because due to the nature of the process of creation of said music. There are tools a-plenty to help mangle, morph, and create never before seen sonic landscapes.
In addition texture being a primary concern in the world of production, I hope to continue to develop new and interesting ways of generating texture through software as well! Recently I had made a relatively small C++ program that utilizes CSound to generate waveforms with a specific number of harmonics. It then takes those harmonics and phases them against each other based off of a "flex degree" as well as starting root note, ect. This essentially results in a similar sound to a super-saw but get's drastically more phased out and droney the higher the harmonic number is set to as well as the higher up in frequency said harmonic is.
The program It is able to generate a .wav file of selected user length of a user generated waveform. It is able to select between sine, triangle, square, and sawtooth waves for each harmonic allowing the creation of some very dissonant and interesting waveforms. I have chosen to call this tool the Microtonal Flex Resonator (MFR for short) and will continue to develop and perfect in the coming months. A short compilation of the sound design potential was created to show off a bit of what the tool can do. You can find the link at the bottom of the post.
Thanks for your time and happy glitchin'! :)
- NUAN_SONAR
Link to my disco
Link to the demo tape for the MFR (note everything but the drums was made using the MFR)