Over the next few months I'm planning a short series of blog posts documenting my attempts to compose some brief musical sketches composed all or in part with SuperCollider. The general aim is to learn the language but also to acquaint myself with some of the myriad methods for composing music with computers.
However, before all of this, without even intending to, I've managed to compose my first piece of music in 6 years. Except, I feel somewhat guilty actually claiming this as my composition because it was born from a typo. A dumb mistake given life by an internal process I don't fully understand. I think this sums up why I've fallen in love with SuperCollider. Even making mistakes can lead to fascinating sonics.
The story is that during my early experiments with the language I managed to produce a sound somewhat akin to distorted, Congotronics-esque percussion. Inspired and ready to lay down some pulsating rhythms, I tried to tweak the sound I was listening to by changing the pitch of those pseudo-drums. Without realizing I accidentally entered a 0 for a parameter that scales the frequency of the sound (I've shared the actual code at the end of this post). Well you don't need a particularly strong grasp of audio synthesis to know that multiplying your sounds by 0 is not really what you want to do.
I expected silence. What I got was something else entirely. Strangulated tones, metronomic clicks and garbled noise. From this disorienting soundscape a series of squeals and beeps occasionally coalesced into fragments of melody. In fact the sound possessed an almost human sense of dynamic pacing, loudly bursting forth to surprise you before retreating into the gloom. This glitch, this aria for processor, continued for about a minute or so before it lost all momentum, ticking along to itself for an infinity. All this took place in a microscopic and hermetic sound space devoid of any natural colour as if I was able to listen in to my laptop's own private raving.
I couldn't help but be inspired by this truly Cageian moment. Chance encounters and sound for sound's sake at its very best. I had to record it. But of course being a meddling little humanoid I tweaked with some inputs, recorded a few more variations, made it faster and slower, added a second voice. I edited these short recordings together to make a piece of music with a few interesting variations but still maintained the odd character of my original mistake.
Mixing it proved quite difficult. Being paranoid these unnatural sounds were too loud I think I overcompensated and mixed it too quietly. Oh well I'm sure the little voice inside my laptop didn't want me messing with its beautiful song too much anyway.
I hope you'll enjoy the mistake that's probably more expressive and adventurous then anything I'll write on my own. Happy Colliding!
The Code:
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