RE: RANDOMNESS

["Michael Peters" <mp@mpeters.de>]

> programmable constrained random deviations from each parameters beginning
setting


maybe some people have heard my Stretched Landscape CD. (There is an 
excerpt
at http://www.soundclick.com/bands/4/michaelpetersmusic.htm). The main
ingredient of this 1-hour piece is piano chords, recorded 1986 in an
abandoned church in Kingston on a cheap cassette recorder, and then three
years ago fed into Granulab, a free granular synthesis software for 
Windows.
My starting idea was to take these chords each of which lasts for just two
or three seconds, and make them veeeerrryyy long. While trying to achieve
that with granular synthesis I discovered that when doing it straight, it
tends to sound cold and artificial, but when I added a tiny bit of random
for the grain length and pitch, the results were shimmering golden clouds 
of
sound that came rolling like thunder over hills, or like the sound of very
distant church bells, or a distant plane, listened to from the top of a
hill, with miles of air and wind moving volume and pitch around in a random
and very organic way.


-Michael
www.michaelpeters.de