Test 4: In the early 2000’s German composer Carsten Nicolai (Alva Noto) released a number of hugely influential electronic records. His early recordings concentrated on
using just sine waves and sound design. In the spirit of these recordings I tested out my sound stones samples to see if I could get close to the early Alva Noto sound.
Sound Stone Tip 1 (melodyne) was the closest sample I had to a pure tone (sine wave).
This is the only sample I am going to use for this piece, I thought it was important to
pitch corrected this sample in order to keep everything in tune, I used the Celemony
Melodyne plugin to do this.
Main Sine Wave: Sound Stone Tip 1 (melodyne) was originally pitched at D5, this was far too high for my main sound so it had to be pitched down to G4.
I wanted to keep this sound as clean as possible only effecting a slower attack and adding a little reverb. I used ¾ timing at 60 bpm to mimic the early Alva Noto recordings.
The Bass/Kick: was re-pitched to G1 and programed in a 4/4 house music style, I didn’t effect it’s sound other than EQ-ing out everything above 300hz.
Blip Noise: is a short note pitched up to G5 with a stereo delay on the insert with a small send going to a delay and reverb.
All the rest: of the sounds were variations on a longer stab noise pitched at G4 heavily processed using a mixture of GRM Tools, Hysteresis, Fracture and Waves Enigma. These passes were then mixed down and edited, some were cut really short to give them a percussive feel and others were over driven to give them a more glitched effect.
Conclusions: Unfortunately due to my time constraints, I couldn’t spend a lot of time experimenting with the stone sample perfectly replicate the Alva Noto tone. I do think I was pretty successful in broadly capturing his sound. I was very happy with the simplicity of the bass/kick and also the blip noise, these really reminded me of the early Murcof recordings. I take away from this test, once again, how much you can do with very little.
I could imagine a very interesting live performance with a stone player and some live sampling and manipulation.