The Ghosts Sing About Ayler

Albert Ayler wrote music about ghosts, witches, devils, demons, and angels. The levels on this range widely. If you use a compressor, you get a declawed piece, but not the one I wrote.

Inspired by Ayler's sax playing and occasional singing, especially the tracks Spiritual Unity, Ghosts, and Witches And Devils (but not using his compositions or recorded audio data).

This was a process piece:

1. set up the recorder environment and input processing for immediate ease of use
2. take a two mile walk, with a a pen and a small pad of paper
3. arrive at a bar and drink more alcohol than I am accustomed to, while writing down the ideas for the composition that occur to me during the walk
4. stumble home and make music

I made a few mistakes in the process (I got sidetracked by happy hour nachos at another bar on the way home, and eventually lost my ability to focus and played nethack before the track was done, having to do the last touches sober the next day).

All sounds generated by my voice, processed through a puredata patch (a patch for fine tuned clipping), and multitracked in ardour, with a global freeverb3 reverb.

(Get Flash to see the track player.)
posted by idiopath (6 comments total)

Oh, and I looked at the pad of paper just now. All I wrote about was beer and being drunk and how drinking always makes me want to write and whether I with my lower than typical tolerance for alcohol perhaps have a higher BAC than a more seasoned drinker, or whether I was just more inebriated with a lower BAC which made me think that drunk driving laws are probably flawed. I didn't write a single thing about the music project I had been thinking about on my way there. I am dreadfuly boring when I drink. And then I almost got run over a few times stumbling down Burnside on my way home.
posted by idiopath at 12:17 AM on April 26

All sounds generated by my voice, processed through a puredata patch

Very cool concept. Can you explain what you mean by "fine tuned clipping"?
posted by wastelands at 12:45 AM on April 26

Fine tuned clipping: the top and bottom edges of the clipping are each adjustable, for most of the recording the clipping is not 0 centered ie. one possible configuration is that with -1.0 to +1.0 as full scale, anything above 0.3 but below 0.33 outputs as -0.7, anything above 0.35 outputs as +0.7, so that without input you get absolute silence, and then past the .3 linear scale threshold you get extreme clipping, with a very negligible range of unclipped signal in between the two hard peaks. This is a more extreme version of the way that class C amps work (the kind you see in old school C.B. transmitters, it saves power because there is near zero quiescent power consumption, and you get a better transmission range because the signal is at or near full scale when there is input).
posted by idiopath at 12:59 AM on April 26

Ohh, I see what you mean. I generally avoid clipping at all costs in my songs, but there's no doubt that clipping can produce interesting effects.
posted by wastelands at 10:23 AM on April 26

I am dreadfuly boring when I drink. And then I almost got run over a few times stumbling down Burnside on my way home.

Well, boring is a real drag, yeah, but aside from that, unless spending some time in the hospital or premature death are part of your strategy, I think you might wanna reconsider your alcohol intake there, friend!
posted by flapjax at midnite at 10:28 PM on April 26

flapjax, I live in the same city as idiopath. To be fair, Burnside is dangerous to walk along even when sober. :-)
posted by wastelands at 10:59 PM on April 28