MDAMAGER

Grenouiller Synthesis (made in MAX and FluComa) There is a website called amphibiaweb.org that hosts a database of frog calls. I'm a big fan of frogs. As a species they are capable of a remarkable range of timbres. They can sound like everything from digital watches to didgeridoos. Human or alien. Otherworldly. They can chirrup with contentedness or shriek in terror. They growl, and hum, and bleep and bloop and clang. The thing that their calls do seem to have in common is that they can be tremendously harmonically complex. They are like little overtone singers. The variety of complex sounds and percussive noises that they make mean that their calls are good for harvesting little grains. This patch uses some* of those frog calls to create an aleatoric rhythmic line. It uses flucoma to concatenate lots of sounds into one big waveform, then creates slicepoints when the volume gets over a certain threshold. Then it puts all those sounds in a 2D corpus, and promptly ignores their locations in 2d space in favour of drunkenly stumbling back and forth through a linear list and triggering a constantly changing sequence of sounds and sometimes subdividing each pulse in the metronome in half, thirds or quarters. ** Amphibiaweb's T&Cs ask that users not download large volumes of files from their servers, but they also ignored my emails asking for a copy of their entire back catalogue (frogalogue?) so I had to download my corpus manually. It was a wild ride. Not least because some of the frogcalls were recorded in Real audio format, so downloading them made me very nostalgic for the halcyon days of 2001.