Rest in peace Phill Niblock🍷
My lasting memory of Phill is him being gently mesmerised by the patterns caused by the sun through a wine glass, during lunch on a beautiful day in the Pyrenees. A very sweet and lightly humorous moment — thank you for everything Phill ❤️
This year I had the great privillege of creating the music and sound design for 'Wood Rots Like We Do', a film by @mfprosier about the ancient shrines of Ise, entirely rebuilt of wood every 20 years, and what they can teach us about regenerating forests today.
By complete chance I had visited the same region of Japan just a couple of weeks before Matt told me he was going out to film the project -- while I was there I did a bunch of field recording just for fun, accidentally capturing the sounds needed for the film!
The film is unique in that it was released this year in 20 parts, and can all be viewed on @mfprosier 's profile, or as a whole video on his Vimeo -- link in bio.
Most of the music for the film was created by processing the recordings from Japan, along with my own recordings of cymbals and plant seeds rolling around in pots, using resonators, time-stretching, and weird convolution reverbs. It was a great creative challenge and I'm very grateful that Matt asked me to take part!
More examples from LUCKY DIP — a sample pack generated entirely by AI, which you can download for free from my Bandcamp (link in bio)
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The sounds were creating using Google's MusicLM, which generates music in response to text prompts. Each text prompt garners two results, slight variations on the same idea. In these clips, the text prompts used to generate each sample are displayed alongside the audio result.
MusicLM is meant to generate music, not sound effects; but some of the audio here was generated in response to descriptions of environmental soundscapes, like "Torrential rain in the rainforest" and "Large church bells ringing in the distance, over a city by the sea". The purpose of these prompts was to explore how MusicLM would interpret text that contains little-to-no suggestion of musical language.
The prompts are a mixture of personal prompts and suggestions from Google. They are not always accurate at reflecting the content of the audio file -- e.g. a prompt containing the phrase "no drums or rhythms of any kind" may still result in an audio file containing rhythms.
LUCKY DIP — a sample pack generated entirely by AI — is available to download for free on my bandcamp (link in bio). Here are some examples of the 67 samples in the pack.
The sounds were creating using Google's MusicLM, which generates music in response to text prompts. Each text prompt garners two results, slight variations on the same idea. In these clips, the text prompts used to generate each sample are displayed alongside the audio result.
MusicLM is meant to generate music, not sound effects; but some of the audio here was generated in response to descriptions of environmental soundscapes, like "Torrential rain in the rainforest" and "Large church bells ringing in the distance, over a city by the sea". The purpose of these prompts was to explore how MusicLM would interpret text that contains little-to-no suggestion of musical language.
The prompts are a mixture of personal prompts and suggestions from Google. They are not always accurate at reflecting the content of the audio file -- e.g. a prompt containing the phrase "no drums or rhythms of any kind" may still result in an audio file containing rhythms.
AURORA has arrived 🌌✨
In this patch I've frozen recordings of a small tongue drum inside Data Bender, which continues to shift and warp the pitch up and down. Aurora then works its magic by blurring and smearing the sound into opalescent atmospheres, occasionally reversing the incoming audio according to the whims of Chance. Prism then softens the high end and resonates to emphasise the attack of the beater on the drum.
I'm just scratching the surface of what Aurora can do, but already it's proving to be a necessary addition to my rig moving forward. Many congrats and thank-yous to the wonderful @qubitelectronix fam for creating such a beautiful sounding (and looking) module 🙏🏻🖤
Had a wonderfully educational and fun week at the @bennygreb drum camp, focusing on the Effective Practicing for Musicians method 🎶 Was such a privilege to spend this time digging into the details of what it means to be a drummer, a musician, and a happy human being. Thank you to Benny for your endless patience, humour, and wisdom, and thank you to all of you who attended for making the week such a fun and memorable time. It would not have been the same without your company. Now, time to practice!!
Absolutely brilliant time at the U.K. Drum Show 🥁 was amazing to see and be inspired by some of the greatest players of this instrument today. But the best part was getting to know the #drumwithmikeandeddy Patreon crew — it’s all about the people, always 👨👩👧👦 @mikeslessons@eddythrower
