eMusic Technique 1

I got thinking that there are so many different little techniques that one can use in electronic music and that I might catalog some of them. I will make an effort to post more going forward. Sort of a cookbook of Electronic Music techniques.

Today I came accross a post for a conference on the duality of Binary. The first that entered my head is the fact that a great deal of electronic music is in two channels. Of course, it could be mono, or it could be n-channeled, but 2 channels is the predominant paradigm. One reason is that once you go beyond the duality of two, the gain is not as significant as from 1 to 2. (I am ignoring the fact that we all own stereo's and rather am considering why is that we own stereo's with 2 instead of 4 speakers, etc etc). There is also the fact that we have 2 ears, an obvious but profound statement. We do transduce a some auditory information through our bones and flesh and it is no surprise that the senatorial aspect of the sub woofer is a prominent feature in some music's.

But this is all an introduction to my thinking about the fact that when we produce electronic music, the resulting file is stereo. That said, when one commits global changes to 1/2 of a mix, it is a very radical and interesting thing. Hence, I made an experiment with altering the playback speed of 1/2 of a mix. The initial sound is something that I generated some time ago (not sure I remember how).

Source


I took this sound and split the stereo file into 2 mono files and then altered the playback speed of one file to slow and speed up. This is a shot of the max patch


I recorded the output and put this file along with the unaltered other channel to create a new version.

AlteredV1


This is a vary simple operation, but I think the results are rather striking.

Another means of accomplishing this is the delay of samples per channel. Here is a version I through together in Logic where the right channel has the a sample delay envelope. This does not alter the pitch as in the previous version and so the effect is different.

AlteredV2


Here is a screen shot of the logic session. The delay on the right channel is represented by the orange line in the second track.