Brendan Landis, who records as Hey Exit, created this sonic thought experiment, taking multiple performances of Erik Satie’s classic Gymnopedie 1, time-stretching each to the same length and then mixing them together.
The result is a performance by a chorus of pianists, that starts and ends in tight synchronization, but blurs into an ambient wash in between, because of the performers’ expressive variations. It’s a bit like Satie via Budd & Eno.
via Marc Weidenbaum of Disquiet, who says:
There’s a joke about being hit by either a ton of bricks or a ton of pillows, and how either way it’s a ton — at some point weight trumps texture. Landis’ experiment reveals that amassed pillowy music doesn’t gather in density so much as exaggerate its inherent properties: a cloud becomes the sky.
Well, not every recording… I didn’t hear Gary Numan’s version of it.
Agreed. I expected to hear the ISAN version blended in there, too.
Very enjoyable.
Would be fun to create a MIDI plug-in that did this: each note on or note off would be delayed & repeated many times randomly within a configurable gaussian distribution. Automatic dream music 🙂
It would only need three parameters: average delay, number of repeats, and standard deviation.
Icing on the cake: apply to velocity too.
It’s actually fairly easy to do using something lik JSFX in Reaper… If I’m bored today I might give it a try.
Listening now. It’s really fascinating. I bit like this… but different…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QspuCt1FM9M
sounds like a band of pianists