spatial looping, rhythmic looping

[Rick Walker <GLOBAL@cruzio.com>]

    Regarding lance glover's comments on physical looping, we hatched an 
idea
in the world music fusion group that I have had for the last 11 years,  
Worlds Collide,
that has interesting looping possibilities.
    One of the games that we've been into is having everyperson in an 
improvisation take
one note of a scale (and a found sound set of timbres such as blowing 
bottles, playing pvc
pipe, playing metal pitched bells, etc.).  We then pick a time signature 
and count it
outloud.
Everybody gets to play their one pitch on one of the metric units of that 
time signature
(if you've never played this game before it is a great one for a 
party----hand out a
different
pitched bottle to every person and let them play on any eighth note that 
they choose in
one measure of 4/4).  The rule of the game is:   you may only play one 
note and you must
commit to whatever note that you have played (say, the 'and' of three in a 
measure of
4/4).
It is actually hard to get musicians to discipline themselves to playing 
only one note and
being content to being one cog in the musical machine.  Ironically, this 
works best with
non-musicians at a party.
    Anyway, long story made longer, we each choose a piece of abs plastic 
pipe (2"
diameter with a rubber cap on the opposite end that you hit) that I had 
cut into a scale.
We picked a 7/4 time signature, each took one metric place in it and 
played our respective
notes with a zory (rubberized beach thong) as we walked in a circle around 
a hung stereo
condenser mike.   In this way, the resultant looping bass line literally 
plays in a circle
around your head if you listen to it on headphones:  rhythmically looped 
and spatially
looped!!!  It sounds very cool and would work as long as you have a 
direction sound source
as you walk in a circle around the mic.

Another cool thing is that the windows media player allows you to play a 
.wav file
repeatedly, thus creating a loop.  A cool experiment that I tried involved 
taking three
persussion .wav files that had ambient tails and playing them each 
simultaneously in three
opened windows media files.   Because they each have random lengths they 
cycle in and out
of each other.    I started playing them whilst recording it all into 
Sound Forge.   When
all three sounds coincide I stop the recording. (it took about 20 seconds, 
all tolled) I
then edited out the last combination of the three timbres playing 
simultanesouly and
copied it a bunch of times and then  programmed it as
a coherent rhythm.  Putting it all together, you have a completely random 
rhythmic thing
that suddenly turns into  a looped ostinato pattern.
    ----Rick Walker (aka, one of many Loop.pooLs)