Video, audio, patch notes
This should have gone out last night, but I’ve been having on and off backend issues with my site’s CMS (content management system). Posting this backdated.
What my modular synthesizer looks like after I’ve spent most of my time in the software version, aka VCV Rack
Hey, I’ve made it nine days into Jamuary. (More on what Jamuary is here.) I’m not going to post all of these as individual posts, more likely as batches.
▰ 06\31 — “Traveller Feller”: This is a step forward from yesterday. Rather than two source field recordings, there are three. The beat, per se, is a pair of white noise equivalents (interior drone of a refrigerator and a fan in a bathroom) cut up and swapped back and forth. The third element is the same street musician as last time, pitched differently and brought more to the foreground. As the track proceeds, the speed at which the sampling of that third element occurs gets faster, which alters the way it sounds in playback (a little more cut-up, even jittery). And then, as with yesterday’s track, at the end it goes back to the original speed, which is a shortcut to a kind of closure. This was a lot of fun to put together, and especially interesting was trying to locate patterns that surfaced the most musically interesting elements of the source audio.
▰ 07\31 — “Monk Chip”: Continuing to push the same patch forward, the Patch of Theseus, switching one after another module as I move ahead. Tried to apply some automation to the pitch of all three samples. It’s rudimentary, but turned out kinda fun.
▰ 08\31 — “Trumpet Tantrum”: This might be a good mode: Making a patch at the start of a week, and nudging it a bit forward each day, and then starting over for the next week. In any case, the differences between today and yesterday are two. First, this is now a public domain field recording of a street musician, a trumpeter, in the “lead” spot. Second, that same “lead” recording appears twice: once using the same treatment as earlier, and the other using a granular module.
▰ 09\31 — “Quad Rat”: Probably the final, at least for now, variant of this seed. I may go back and label them as such. This version has four sample sources, drawn from the previous rounds, all but one now through a granular module, the other “merely” chaotically pitched. All in VCV Rack. At first it’s just three samples, and the additional one is introduced about halfway through.
Hey, I’ve made it five days into Jamuary, so not so bad. (More on what Jamuary is here.) I’m not going to post all of these as individual posts, but since I was pretty happy with the fifth one, I figured I’d tie the most recent three into one post.
▰ 05\31 — “Ives Talkin'”: I’ve lately been making a lot of field recordings, mostly of what people might think of as noise: urban and rural, interior and exterior, and various realms in between. Among those recordings are occasional snippets of other people: speaking, singing, making music, doing things. Recording people feels, to me, a bit like taking photos of people, which is to say I’m not entirely comfortable with it. In particular, I’m not sure I’d share field recordings of musicians overheard on the street. What I’ve done here, in contrast, is to take two field recordings and combine them, the source material pushed past the point of recognizability. In VCV Rack I then placed those two quite different recordings into a pair of sample modules, and then set four markers in each, the positions determined by sample and hold of a noise source. I then put those through respective switches so they rotated through, and those outputs through switches that went back and forth between the two different sources. Then I slowly ratcheted up the speed at which that back and forth occurred, faster and faster, manually, until I finally jumped back to a slower pace, which brought it all to a conclusion.
▰ 04\31 — “Chatter Boxing”: Three sounds in one, all excerpted from field recordings. The underlying structure that sets the pace is a small snippet of an industrial drone, courtesy of the regional power company’s backup generators, put on repeat. The two other elements are both chatter, one from birds and the other from humans, repeating in differing patterns. What might be discerned as a melodic bass element is some background music playing during the recording of human chatter. All done in VCV Rack.
▰ 03\31 — “Re: Generators”: Third day of Jamuary, working just in VCV Rack. I had this field recording of the noise from massive generators temporarily installed in the neighborhood during a recent citywide power outage. The volume was just shy of 100 decibels. I slowed the track down, which significantly lowered the pitch, and then ran two slightly out of sync treatments. One of them turned on and off a high-pass filter, while the other glitched out the sounds. Think of it as processing infrastructure-induced trauma.
My favorite — or at least my most utilized — synthesizer module is probably the low-pass filter. I like trimming the upper end off a signal. I like how doing so can make a sound feel distant, not just physically but emotionally. There is no active filtering on this recording, however. This is simply a very loud noise, continuously registering at nearly 100 decibels, as heard from roughly two blocks away. Distance, in other words, provides the filter. Massive portable electric generators, running on diesel and each the size of a dry freight trailer, had been placed outside a local substation when power outages hit much of the city. Up close, the sound was painful. Blocks away, it could still disturb your sleep. Out on the street, the drone — present but, of course, invisible — felt alien: unwanted, unexpected, and, foremost, uncanny. As the days went on, the sound became more familiar, but never any more welcome. After power was restored and the machines were turned off, however, I could appreciate the tonality by listening back to a short clip. I could luxuriate in the slow waveforms, and enjoy the way the drone collaborated with the sound of passing vehicles. Recording is a form of capture. I had captured the alien presence with my recording device, and now it was under my control, rather than the other way around.
Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro on December 24, 2025. Posted to SoundCloud and Freesound. This post is part of an ongoing series of field recordings that generally last for roughly 30 seconds and are collectively titled #30s.
The main dining room of the restaurant drew little attention to itself. The terrazzo tables were functional: smooth surfaces and a complicated enough design to hide dropped morsels and small spills. The lighting came from massive, fabric-covered globes. The main nod to any sort of motif was a series of paintings high on the walls, images of birds so plainly figurative they seemed to have been sourced from encyclopedias rather than from the natural world. The bathroom was small, functional, and nearly as clean as the dining room, despite constant use by diners. What at first sounded inside the bathroom like an echo of voices from outside (though there is some of that, too) turned out to be piped-in bird chatter set to loop endlessly. There were no bird paintings on the bathroom walls, but the ear and eye connected the intention in the dots. This is, in effect, a field recording of a field recording, the real inside the real. (The bathroom photographed here is not the same as the one where the recording was made.)
Recorded on an iPhone 17 Pro on Friday, January 2, 2026, in San Francisco. Posted to SoundCloud and Freesound. This post is part of an ongoing series of field recordings that generally last for roughly 30 seconds and are collectively titled #30s.
