Diving into “clipping” in audio, and thinking about the aesthetic possibilities of going beyond the limits of a system.
In this video, I use Audacity and Max/MSP to look at examples of both hard clipping and soft clipping, checking out the harmonic spectra of these distortions and thinking about how we can use clipping as an expressive tool in our compositions or sound design.
Brian Eno coined the term “ambient music” to describe music that is “intended to induce calm and a space to think,” and “as ignorable as it is interesting.” We can make a simple patch in Pd that recreates one of Eno’s techniques, creating a system that endlessly generates ambient music for us with the notes that we choose.
Give it a try and make your own interesting and ignorable music.
Check out Tero Parviainen’s introduction on “How Generative Music Works” for more demonstrations and ideas.