A sickly imitation

April 28, 2011 9:51 AM

A “cover” of Autechre's Cichli made by splicing together tiny pieces of nearly every other song released by Autechre, making a tour through their discography in reverse chronological order. My minimalist video makes this a bit more entertaining and easier to follow by flashing each song's title every time a piece of it is used.

I created this with a program I wrote over the past couple of weeks that chops up the original song and searches for the best matching pieces of the other songs by brute force, using a fairly simple measure of spectral similarity over several time scales. (Here's the full list of pieces used, 16906 in all, from 168 songs, each 12-93 ms long.) Except for crossfades between the pieces, there were no additional volume changes or other processing.

Originality-wise, I have mixed feelings about this as my first challenge submission. (It being a completely mechanical “cover,” using a technique best reserved for remixing videos of cats walking on pianos.) But I thought it came out interesting enough to share.

At least I can say it captures the sonic essence of Autechre in a very literal way. (Also, I don't know too many other bands that would stand up so well to this kind of treatment. Early experiments with Led Zeppelin were not promising.)


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posted by mubba (2 comments total) 3 users marked this as a favorite

This is fantastic. cortex did something like this with one of the EchoNest scripts, but the source material wasn't remotely as broad. Also, I kind of like the way this actually sounds like Autechre, although I guess, as you say, that's largely owing to the character of their music.

Anyway, I liked listening to this.
posted by koeselitz at 10:24 AM on April 28, 2011


Ha! Yes. What you've done is totally original an in it's own way a great distillation. Wow.
posted by snsranch at 7:40 PM on April 29, 2011


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