disquiet, disquiet0015-rgbinteract Kaboodle Sound
Three [disquiet0015-rgbinteract]

This was created for the Disquiet Junto - this was the mission assigment for this week: "...represent the way Red, Green, and Blue interact with each other and form other colors in the process. You'll accomplish this through two steps. First, you will create three simple sounds, one representative of each of three primary colors. Second, you will cause them to interact, in the form of a composition. The initial sounds might be tones, or beats, or chords, or even note sequences.

"You'll symbolize Red with a sound derived from the number 600, Green from the number 540, and Blue from the number 450. And certainly, you might choose to explore the ratios between these numbers, rather than the specific numbers themselves (e.g., 60/54/45 or 30/27/22.5, just as two examples)."

More details on the Disquiet Junto at:

soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto

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I started by creating tones in Audacity - the quickest, most obvious route to simulating colours derived from numbers. I created a range of tones, all at 600hz (red), 540hz (green), 450hz (blue), 60hz, 54hz and 45hz. I initially tried to match colours to particular waveforms - red was sawtooth, blue a square wave, and green for a sine (that's how they 'felt right' to me).

But I didn't like the results once I started playing with the waveforms on a sampler. I had two abortive attempts at doing something I didn't hate, and got lucky on the third attempt.

I was determined, despite my mounting frustration, to stick to using ONLY tones of 600hz, 540hz, etc. and not to deviate from that. I wanted to get a similar effect to the way red, green and blue, when combined on a TV, monitor, projector, etc. will produce a range of colours simply by overlapping. I suppose I cheated from the beginning by using tones of 60hz, 54hz, and 45hz, but I needed some bass sounds for it to feel right.

I ended up using 63 different samples, starting with saw, square and sine waves at the above-mentioned frequencies. Using these 12 basic samples, I edited them in Audacity to produce more, at differing lengths ('red' samples were set at 0.6 and 6 seconds, 'green' samples at 0.54 and 5.4 seconds, and 'blue' samples at 0.45 and 4.5 seconds). I combined the samples, mixing Blue and Red, Red and Green, Red, Green and Blue for each of the different waveforms in various configurations. Some of them produced a 'beating' or 'pulsing' effect (like in brainwave entrainment), but it was too monotonous to use as a beat.

I was going to stop at 60 samples, but I made three synth drum samples (using an Audacity plugin). I ended up only using the drums as little noises, rather than beats.

The crackles and pops in the sound are the result of the waveforms mixing (probably should have turned down the gain more when combining them), but I liked the sort of 'organic' feel they lent the recording.

I played all 63 samples lives on a Roland SP555 sampler. The samples were all set to loop, a bit like a Mellotron (but not as good as that). The SP555 had a 'tape loop' effect running on all samples, and was connected to a Mini KP Kaoss pad, which was set to a slicer (or noise gate) effect. This was in turn connected to another Mini KP, which was running a Mid Grain Shifter effect. Then THIS Mini KP was connected to KP3 Kaoss pad, which was running a Mutli Tap Delay. All 4 devices were set to 106 BPM. (Because the mean average of 60, 54 and 45 is 53 - that was too low for the BPM, so I doubled it).

I recorded three lives performances on a Zoom h4N, and combined the performances in Ardour, to position them in the stereo space and line them up properly. No editing of the performances was done - they were combined 'as is'.

The image is taken directly from here, and was not really altered (just trimmed):
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil...rcles-48bpp.png