Get that fresh clean feeling!

Let’s see now…

Orchestra: I think it sounds like strings and flutes and perhaps just the lightest little percussion section with cymbals in the back.

Space: In my universe, Ambient music is awesome, but Space music has a definite direction to follow. This piece goes somewhere.

Instant: You wouldn’t believe how quickly this whole piece came together.

So, yeah. Just when I’d given up on completing RPM, here’s another installment.  That makes 17:28. That means I’m halfway there! And I’ve got two days left! I don’t think I’ll be able to finish, but it’s been fun trying.

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This piece is an artifact from the future. Not long after the dust of the destruction from the Neo-Jihadists had settled, North America collapsed into civil war. The New Republic and the CRI (Coalition of Rugged Individualists) battled for control of territory and any remaining infrastructure, both claiming to be the underdog, and both better-funded and more powerful than either was willing to admit.

The Jihad destroyed nearly everything. The internet is gone, telephone communication is only possible within small communities if it’s available at all, and television simply requires too much valuable electricity to allow a set to be kept on very long, let alone produced. The only reliable systems of communication are radio broadcast and print, and even then, they’re prohibitively expensive — and therefore controlled by the factions. Mostly.

A third faction exists, officially classified as “terrorists” by both sides. They’re a loose network of rebels, made up mostly of punks, hackers, journalists, and a few other malcontents who refused to swear allegiance to either side during the Jihad. While they’re referred to as Anarchs by both the New Republic and the CRI (and occasionally as The Fourth Estate, if you’re sure nobody is listening) , they’ve never actually claimed a name, preferring to mark their work with the phrase “We are Anonymous. I am Legion.” Mostly, they work to interfere with both factions, griefing both sides with everything from transmitter sabotage to bizarre Dadaist performances impersonating typical faction propaganda displays. As time went, their actions and techniques became highly sophisticated.

Being that radio transmission is the only form of communication left that’s faster than gossip, “number stations” have experienced a renaissance during the Second Civil War, mostly because, historically, their codes were notoriously hard to break. This is an example of an intercepted short-wave transmission typical of that time. It’s impossible to say where it came from, or from who, without deciphering the code.

This story concept, “universe”, entities mentioned, and general story idea is hereby released into the public domain. However, if you decided to use any or all of the text of this post in a creative work, please contact me and let me know. I just want to see where it goes, if it goes anywhere. The audio portion of this post is not a part of the public domain, and rights are reserved on portions of the audio that are inextractable from the rest of the piece. Please contact me for more details.

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Just a little shorty this time. This is what happens when you take pink noise (artificial wind), overdrive the shit out of it through a phaser set to 11, run it through an analog centerpass filter, then stick it through a “gong model” (whatever the hell that is) to fatten it up and give it that harmonic, shimmery sound. I actually ended up with about 5 minutes of this, but I figured 30 seconds was more than enough.

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And we’re off! As the first track in my RPM offerings, I present “Intergalactic Windchimes”. This bit is 5:19 long, or approximately 15% of my goal of 35 fresh minutes of audio.

Intergalactic Windchimes is built from a highly processed 5 second sample of brown noise. (Noise comes in different colors. White noise has an even spread across frequencies, while other colors of noise have different properties and therefore their own distinctive sounds. On it’s own, brown noise sounds like a wave constantly in the middle of crashing.) In the process of stretching out and processing the sample, many harmonics have been highlighted, and the result is an extended piece that sounds like an accidental radio broadcast from an alien civilization who considers wind chime music to be high art.

Lesson learned: When heavily processing a piece of audio (in Audacity, at any rate), it’s very difficult to not end up with a very sci-fi result. The process itself, as I do it, leaves enormous artifacts embedded in the sound that are tough to remove and almost impossible to prevent. The digital artifacts have an inescapable electronic, artificial and ordered sound, something that I think most people associate with “the future”.

Next goal? Something that sounds different from this.

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Let’s see… school just started, I work full time, I manage all these god damn websites, I have a wife that needs my attention now and again, and my car is desperately in need of an oil change.

Dunno about you, but it sounds like the perfect time to start a killer insane project!

I signed up the other day with the RPM Challenge. In really short terms, it’s the NaNoWriMo for recording musicians. During the month of February (now with 24 extra hours!), you need to come up with, record, and master a CD with ten songs or 35 minutes of sound. Just like Nano, it doesn’t need to be good, it just needs to be done. Since I haven’t written an actual song in years, I figured I could take this opportunity to really dig into sound art type stuff, play with ambient textures, and generally assemble a collection of noise that will be little more than proofs of concept. It’s a challenge to plug in my digital audio toys and see if I can come up with 35 minutes of not nothing in an absurd time frame.

I don’t know what I’ll come up with during the month of February. What I do know is that I’ll be updating this site with whatever I do come up with, as frequently as I can. I probably won’t do a whole lot of talking, if any, because I do know that talking into a microphone is still an inefficient practice for me. For my own sanity, I’ve also made a rule that, unless I need something specific or I find something that inspires me, all my samples will come from The Freesound Project. Whether or not I can stick to it is yet to be seen. My goal, from beginning to end, is to use public domain work in my work, and then release everything as CC-attribution. The only reason I’m not releasing the new work as public domain myself is because I’m vain, and while the goal is to set this stuff free, it’s the least I can do to get reports on derivative works, if any.So, that’s the news. Wish me luck. Better yet, go sign up for RPM ’08 and suffer with me.