Tarmac by Another Neglected Hobby
This recording began as an exploration of the JavaScript Systems Music blog post created by Tero Parviainen @teropa here: http://teropa.info/blog/2016/07/28/javascript-systems-music.html
As a longtime fan of Brian Eno's Music for Airports, I enjoyed Tero's look at creating an automated JavaScript system to reproduce this composition. I decided to try to build something similar within a DAW, copying the piano samples from Tero's post, which were from the Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra.
Then, I used Kontakt in Native Instruments to create samples of the same twelve notes using a strings synthesizer. I arranged the twelve piano clips in one channel and used the trigger command so that each clip would play for a certain length and either repeat once or trigger the next clip in the channel. I did the same with the recorded string samples in a different channel.
Next, I duplicated the piano channel twice and duplicated the strings channel twice, giving me three channels of piano clips and three channels of string clips. Seventh and eighth channels were added for clips of other ambient sounds and field recordings that I created.
I refined the sounds by re-pitching some clips by one or two octaves and altering the length of the clips to add some randomness to the triggering of the clips as they played. For each recorded variation I began the track with a different triggered combination of clips, so that differing combinations of notes resulted. Variations also include some changes to the ambient and field recording soundbed. Variation 4 is the same recording of Variation 3, re-pitched and slowed one-half octave lower.
The result is something that I hope exhibits some of the same characteristics that Eno's early ambient music did, that it can be both interesting and ignorable.
Tracklist
| 1. | Tarmac - Variation 1 | 77:14 |
| 2. | Tarmac - Variation 2 | 69:14 |
| 3. | Tarmac - Variation 3 | 71:30 |
| 4. | Tarmac - Variation 4 | 70:05 |
