Clapping music

Whilst working on my album Themes 1-50 I employed the help of my good friend Kris for his skills in the percussion department. As well as the drum and cymbal rolls that made it onto the album, Kris also performed three clean confident claps of varying velocities at the top of a narrow stair.

The space used for the clap recording gave a very significant spring reverb sound with a clearly audible pitch. I was surprised at how little treatment was required for these claps to be more like pitched tones than percussive instances.

After rolling off the attack (or increasing the attack rather), cutting unneeded frequencies and compressing a little the claps resembled a granulated synthesiser and the sound could be called the 'cloud' pre-set. These sounds were stretched across all octaves in the sampler so that the higher the pitch I played the sounds back, the shorter duration the pitch lasted. Up in the higher registers the sound was staccato (almost percussive again) and down at the lower pitches it turned into a long lofi digitally distorted rumble, but all the while sounding distinctly metallic.

This was during a long intense interest in sounds and their sources and sounds' relationship to their sources. Indeed, this piece was intended for a project (most likely a CD release) compiled of recordings drawn from limited sources. It's working title was Sound by Source (capitals for seriousness as Taleb would say) and it accompanied pieces made exclusively from a Yamaha TYU 140 keyboard, a plastic hand toy, an electric guitar, a five string bass guitar, and my mouth (unfortunately this mouth piece sounded too similar to Window Licker by Aphex Twin). I enjoyed taking these sounds out of context and listening to them in new (if unoriginal) light. Things often seem more interesting when observed from a different perspective, indeed, TheManWhoFellAsleep has pages and pages of (perhaps fictional) quotes overheard on the London Underground. These are phrases that most likely flew by unnoticed by any involved conversationalists but yet have become hilarious and baffling when presented as one liners.

Anyway, back to the clap song, I haven't uploaded it on here because I plan on making a video for it. I have a few ideas, one of which (the strongest idea so far) is to have visual claps in different fashions from different angles associated with the different sounds, textures and rhythmical phrases generated from the original three claps at the top of the stairs. The main drawback I foresee with this approach is the intricate nature of all the synchronization, not just between visual and audio claps, but between the layers of visual claps and the layers of claps on the audio recording. The recording has been sequenced via midi to a set tempo, so this would not be impossible, just a pain in the anus.