Random segments of tape

I do this sometimes for fun, sometimes to create something interesting. This time, I took a recording from NPR and used it as source material. Here’s the loop all spliced together, shot with my crappy digital camera:

See that thing on the mic stand? I’ll write about that later. Anyway. If you’re familiar with Steve Reich then you might know something about “Phasing”. From the Wikipedia article on Phasing:

… The same part (a repetitive phrase) is played on two musical instruments, in steady but not identical tempo. Thus, the two instruments gradually shift out of unison, creating first a slight echo as one instrument plays a little behind the other, then a doubling with each note heard twice, then a complex ringing effect, and eventually coming back through doubling and echo into unison.

In the following sound clip, I took the most obvious example of this concept, and looped the particular passage:

I took this even further, and doubled up the tracks until I hit four stereo pairs. I mixed that down to two tracks, and then recorded them onto my 1/4″ four-track machine. I repeated this once more, and ended up with a recording of 16 stereo pairs of the initial recording. It’s chaotic and it sounds… interesting, maybe? After a while I thought it sounded absolutely irritating.

This experiment yielded nothing valuable. Here’s one, though, that I liked. I put this together in November last year.

My ears are fatigued now, so I’m going to kill this boredom with Chinese delivery and Netflix.