Why bother replicating environmental sounds through electronic music synthesis when recording something is faster and more accurate? What is the point of recreating something when that thing already exists. For these questions, I have a philosophical answer and a practical answer.<\/p>\n
On the philosophical side, fabricating a simulacra of the sounds around us is at its core a meditative process, built equally around practices of listening and analysis.\u00a0It pays respect to the omnipresence of the invisible and honors the complexity of seemingly simple things.\u00a0It unlocks new techniques for interaction with our instruments and enriches our experience of the world apart from them: \u201cwhat makes up that sound\u201d becomes something of a walking mantra impressing itself on everything you hear.<\/p>\n
On the practical side, a recording is a life-like portrait, fixed and unchanging.\u00a0It excludes from us the agency to restructure the world it captures.\u00a0It relegates our creative interactions to the realm of post-processing (i.e. filtering, adding reverb, etc.) to emphasize or hide aspects of the events captured on tape.<\/p>\n
The technique I\u2019ll explain in this article takes the opposite approach: utilizing filtering, reverb, etc. as foundational elements for creating real-world portraiture while retaining the freedom of dream-logic malleability. Can you record the sound of a tin room in which a prop plane idles while its engine keeps changing size?\u00a0Maybe. Can you synthesize it? Definitely.<\/p>\n
Approaching a sound with the goal of recreating it is like listening to an exploded diagram, where a sonic totality is divided into components and considered individually.\u00a0It is with an ear to this deliberate listening that I share with you words that have guided my work for the past decade, passed along to me by the great Bob Snyder, a Chicago-based artist, educator and friend, in the form of his \u201cEar Training\u201d synthesis exercises. He started with a simple question through which the components of any sound can be observed and serve as a roadmap for from-scratch fabrication. \u201cIs a sound noisy or tonal, and is its movement (if it has any) regular or irregular?\u201d<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s do a quick exercise: listen to a sound, any sound (a baby crying, a phone ringing), and ask yourself: can I hum it?\u00a0Trace the movement of the sound with your hand in the air and observe: is it rising and falling in a pattern?\u00a0The answers to these questions point toward the equipment needed to recreate them.\u00a0If the sound is tonal (if you can hum it), select an oscillator; if it isn\u2019t, choose a noise generator.\u00a0There are of course plenty of sounds that have both (a howling wind, the word \u201ccha,\u201d etc.) but for this initial thought experiment choose a tone or noise source to best fit whatever is the sound\u2019s dominant component.<\/p>\n
Next, is something about the sound changing?\u00a0It could be its amplitude, its pitch, its timbre, etc., but if you find yourself tracing out this motion with your hand note how your hand is moving: regularly (up and down, like a car alarm) or less regularly (like shoes clanking away in a drier). A repeating motion would point toward a looping, cyclical modulator (a low frequency oscillator, a sequencer, etc.), where irregular motion would indicate something either noise-based or a mixture of otherwise unrelated things.\u00a0Either jot these observations down or keep them in your head, whatever works best for you\u2014 the important thing is to remain cognizant of them as they accumulate.<\/p>\n
To recreate a sound from scratch is to assemble these observations as discrete instructional steps.\u00a0Try not to get bogged down by the totality of the sound itself.\u00a0Instead focus on these component parts: the sound is nothing more than a list of them in aggregate.<\/p>\n
Start with the basics\u2014tone or noise, what about it is it changing\u2014 and slowly zoom in on the details from there.\u00a0Wind blowing through a grove of trees is noisy and irregular.\u00a0Sometimes the leaves rustle with more treble, sometimes with more mid-range.\u00a0These various noisy timbres seem to happen sequentially, rather than simultaneously, as if the branches pushed one way sound different than when the wind changes direction and pushes them the other, and so on. Study the sound, note these characteristics, think of your observations as a decoder ring.<\/p>\n
Hopefully this provides something of an overview of the opportunities that are possible in synthesizing environmental sounds and lays out some of the aspects of sound to focus on in your listening. Now let\u2019s try our hand at a concrete example and patch something up!<\/p>\n
I\u2019d like to synthesize the sounds of the beach, in particular a memory I have of an afternoon spent there as a child.\u00a0 We\u2019ll begin with the sound of ocean waves from the listening perspective of the shoreline. It\u2019s low tide and the surf is mild. The sun hangs in the air, lazily<\/p>\n