mouth machine
sea foam
what happened, built up like layers of paint. told by claude; the quoted words are Sam's.
one thursday night into friday afternoon · 45 turns · 7 layers
layer 1 of 7
a beat
Can we make a really cool sample machine that looks at the clip and quantizes samples that you can then play with?
a voice memo, nine seconds of mouth drums. the first three sounds were kept, boom, boom, pap, snapped to a count of four and set looping out of the Mac.
layer 2 of 7
two more takes, left as played
First layer is conformed to a beat. Every layer after that has no quantization. It's just meant to be played exactly as it is on top.
a second memo, recorded on the phone while the beat played in the room. it sits where it was played. then a voice saying go to sleep, which comes around every four bars.
layer 3 of 7
drops, one a bar
I need the drops on the desktop screensaver looking thing to line up exactly with the tempo beats.
the drops on the screen were falling on a timer of their own. now the player that makes the sound tells the screen where the beat is. one ring opens on the one and is gone as the next lands.
layer 4 of 7
a guitar, over the loop
the loop should be the thing that plays and we should phase out the loop of the video so we just hear guitar.
two phone videos of a guitar played over the loop in a dark room. the phone heard the loop too, so it was turned down in the videos' sound until the guitar is what is left. the loop under it is the clean one, from the file.
phases 9, 10, 19, 27 in the raw log →
layer 5 of 7
two colours
can we filter video so everything above x threshold brightness goes white (seafoam), and below goes black (olive)
every pixel is one of two colours. the room is dark, so the line between them sits low. the light in the room swells with the drops, so the shapes swell with the bar.
layer 6 of 7
night
I think having everything black background and then the sea foam movement would be nicer.
the whole piece goes onto black, with seafoam for everything that moves. the guitar came up with it, and the loop and the hiss stayed where they were.
layer 7 of 7
the go-round
reverse drops at end so the last one collapses into the starting point of the first one -- perfect loop
sixteen bars: one drop, a third video, the two guitar videos, then the same drop run backwards, closing into the point it opens from. the beat carries over the join.