New Ambience: Mainframe

Greetings Patrons,

I was experimenting with some extreme audio processing of organic sounds this week. I had a few recordings of me playing a ney flute (ok, playing may be an exaggeration) which I sent through some granular synth engines and then mapped a few parameters to MIDI controllers and...all this is to say that I could take the sound from raw organic into twisted glitch and back again and I thought it sounded cool.

As with all my audio experiments I sat back, said "nice" to myself, and then wondered what it was all for. Often I'll just file them away in a sound design folder, but I liked the technological/organic mashup for this one and it got me thinking about cyberspace.

Mainframe is a highly abstract, aleatoric track that has a bit of tension, and dare I say? A bit of beauty as well. Aside from the aforementioned ney flute, there is a bit of live cymbal and some physical modeling synthesis (creating real-world sounds synthetically). I leaned in to the organic meets digital vibe and I think it all worked quite well.

For the ambience portion, I continued down the same path and created synthesized wind and atmospheric elements. The 'computing' sounds were similarly synthesized and played in by hand. It's often not clear which sonic elements are music and which are ambience. I thought about making more of a distinction but I think the whole piece is about blending these two elements.

As this is in Patreon sneak-peek mode, I've included the mixed version, as well as music-only, and ambience-only versions of this track. Additionally, I created two 'less activity' versions which dial down the computing/telemetry effects a bit.

Since this track is so highly abstract I feel that it could be used in a variety of genres. I could even see it in a fantasy game as a strange magical plane.

Thank you all, as always, for your continuing support.

Best,

Tim

https://tabletopaudio.com