electroplankton bath

Displacement activity really kicks in when I'm dead busy and it's the only time I find myself trying musical things these days, ie when I shouldn't be. Last night, when I should have been writing big presentations I started mucking about with electroplankton - playing it into GarageBand and seeing if you could get an effective bit of music out of it.

And the answer's No, not yet. But I think it should be do-able. I made a 6-minute bit of ambient dribbling which isn't unpleasant but isn't any better than something you'd buy from one of those CD stands at national monuments amongst the sounds of the forest. Hanenbow (above) does the plinky noises.

Luminloop does the sustained chords in an eno-stylee.

Volvoice does everything else, basically the strange background noises, which I did by playing what I'd done before into him (he's a kind of mutating sampler) and sending it back out to GarageBand. All I did was layer stuff on top of each other, no tweaking the loops or anything. Anyone can do it, frankly. Self-generating ambient music for spas and offices can't be far off. It was fun though. May not be fun to listen to but it was fun to make.

MP3 File

Comments

[Ben]

I'm busy writing our next Dossier and listening to this.

It's not brilliant but it's better than Steve Wright.

[Ben Blench]

Nice. Still haven't played with the plankton, but I did come across this the other day:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0h-RhyopUmc

The reactable - a multi-user electronic music instrument with a tabletop tangible user interface. Several simultaneous performers share complete control over the instrument by moving physical objects on a luminous table surface. By moving and relating these objects, representing components of a classic modular synthesizer, users can create complex and dynamic sonic topologies, with generators, filters and modulators, in a kind of tangible modular synthesizer or graspable flow-controlled programming language. More here: http://mtg.upf.edu/reactable/

[Rob Mortimer]

I love that game. I got it from Japan when it first launched.

I also know a guy who did a gig using just a drum machine and electroplankton!

[Charles Edward Frith]

Just tripped over this file on my cluttered desktop. A pretty good candles and incense effort :)