Processing Useless Sounds
A scenario presented itself to me as I was working with the Tension synthesizer. I had placed the hybrid reverb after it followed by an OTT. I was generating clicks made lush by the overcompressed reverb. It presented rich developing rhythms to me. As I, out of curiosity, turned off the OTT I came to realize that what entered the OTT was a highly unpleasant and noisy crackling sounding mostly like an audio system malfunctioning.
This may sound like me repeating myself as based on earlier sections. Small impact sounds can make an effect, designed to dress up an already musical sound, ”speak for itself”. However, there is another layer to this as it pertains to misuse.
Throughout my experiments I have come to the insight that there appears to be an inherent musicality to even the malfunction of digital music equipment. The sounds will often contain repeating sounds with internal movements and evolving rhythms. What I have found in these sounds is a certain musicality that I have struggled with creating in electronic music, something that I have often tried to program but which has ended up seeming arbitrary and forced when doing so. Something that is not random, but also containing something deeper than the stiff rhythms of a drum machine. These evolving sounds which first seem like useless noise are often just waiting to be processed, for example, as often in this practice, flattened to reveal what is hiding at low decibels and processed to shape the texture of the sound.