This weekend I made my first proper contribution to the Disquiet Junto and attempted this weeks project No. 63.
More on this 63th Disquiet Junto project at:
disquiet.com/2013/03/14/disquie…-gregorianorianian
More details on the Disquiet Junto at:
soundcloud.com/groups/disquiet-junto/
The source of this piece is a recording of monks singing Gregorian chant at the Abbey of Sant’Antimo in Italy:
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sana…_gregorian.ogg
This is how I went about it…
First I selected about 15 seconds of the original recording containing four distinct sung musical phrases and stretched it x50 producing a 15 minute long audio file to use as a background drone. From this I selected a four minute section.
From this same 15 seconds of the original recording I separated out the four distinct musical phrases and saved them individually.
I then loaded up the resulting five files as seperate tracks in Ableton Live. (The previous steps were done in Audacity).
I made no further alterations to the stretched file but applied different echo, reverb and delay effects to each of the four musical phrases and looped them.
When I first played all the tracks back together it sounded absolutely mind-blowing and I thought I might turn into Phil Spector on the spot!!! The layered sound was so dense and textured while the loops went in and out of phase with each other in a classic electronic music way due to them all being slightly different lengths.
It continues to intrigue me how electronic manipulation of nothing but the human voice in this instance, can produce effects that sound like musical instruments, and conversely when I have manipulated electric guitar in this way you could swear there was a human voice in there.
Despite what it sounds like, there is no other source material here but the monks singing.
