(Travis' notes on the piece).
I began the composition of this piece by choosing a sound file that
contained several different sonic characteristics. kurTwaing.aiff
had both sharp percussive attacks and some sustained pitched
material. I decided to create a dialectic between these two types
of sounds, and arrived at a simple trajectory that could be realized
within a one-minute piece. Basically, the piece morphs from long
drawn-out sounds to short percussive sounds. The piece begins
with a texture that was created through convolution (a technique not
found in Audacity, unfortunately) I "convolved" the entire
original sound file with a copy of the melodic ostinato that makes its
appearance later in the piece. This has the effect of playing one
sound through another. The "grinding" sounds that enter via the
left and right channels were created by taking the tail end of a
kalinga note, time-stretching it, reversing it, and pasting the
reversed copy onto the beginning of the non-reversed version. The
melodic ostinato that enters next was created by copying the extreme
end of a kalinga note and pitch-shifting it by half-steps within a
minor third up or down. (1,2, and 3 steps up and down.)
This gave me 7 notes with which to build a melody, so I simply arranged
them in a way that sounded interesting, and copied and pasted it
multiple times in a row. This ostinato is eventually supplanted
by the same melody played with a more percussive sound. This was
simply the same processing techniques applied to the extreme beginning
of a kalinga note. Towards the end of the piece, the repetitive
nature of the melody begins to fall apart, which was accomplished by
randomly deleting notes within the melody and adding others of
differing lengths. Most sounds in the piece were panned either
hard left or hard right, which prevented certain sounds from masking
others. Aside from the opening convolution texture, I basically
only used three techniques to create this piece - panning, pitch
shifting and careful cutting and pasting.