File:Justin Buckley - 06 - Modular Mart - established 1992 disquiet0038-asrealasitgets2.ogg

English: Modular Mart - established 1992 (disquiet0038-asrealasitgets2) by Justin Buckley.
This week's Junto assignment was to create what appears to be a field recording, but is actually created from artificial sounds. With my piece, I took this quite literally. Everything in this track is created from either my modular synthesiser or my Mac's Text to Speech feature. Here's how you can create such a piece: 1) Get a head cold. This gives you some time indoors and it helps to free up the thinking a little. To get your cold, stay outside with inadequate clothing on a cool early fall evening a few days in advance of creating the piece. 2) Use your Mac's TextEdit to write some department store speech segment cliches, right click to Add to iTunes as speech (use several different voices) and then bring into Audacity to chop them up. 3) Use your analog modular synthesizer to create some kind of muzak which you'll use to play over the fictional department store's speakers. Think europhia, think shopping. Up the tempo. 4) Interrupt your muzak with some service announcements. Use a simple sine wave chord for the bing which happens before the announcement. Hint: if you happen to be a Father Ted fan, you might be able to adapt a joke from series 1 here. 5) Put the whole muzak piece through a band pass filter and some reverb to make it sound authentic. If you don't feel like shopping at this point, go back to step 3. 4) Take a few recordings of your voices, filter out all low frequency tones, drape in reverb to give you some unintelligible background voices. 5) Use a random source to create white noise at both a low frequency and a mid range frequency, drape in reverb, and use as background hums. 6) Use a random source to trigger simple sine wave chords at random time intervals to use as cash register beeps. 7) Make footsteps by putting a sine wave through a low pass filter, hit the cutoff and the resonance at a regular interval to ping the filter, then apply a high pass to the whole thing to get rid of bass. 8) Lots of panning on everything, lots of slow volumes changes. Done! People will never know it's faked. This Disquiet Junto project was done in association with the exhibit As Real As It Gets, organized by Rob Walker at the gallery Apex Art in Manhattan (November 15 - December 22, 2012): http://apexart.org/exhibitions/walker.php/ More on this 37th Disquiet Junto project at: http://disquiet.com/2012/09/20/disquiet0038-asrealasitgets2/