Day 218 / Cacophony

A new Monome Community Remix Project is underway.  I’m hosting this one and when I sent out the sample pack I instructed everyone to try an app that they’ve never used before.  So on this evening (Sunday evening) I decided to follow my own advice.

The monome app that I chose is called “xor“.  It’s kind of hard to describe how it works.  If you’re a monomer and know the apps then it’s a combo between Flin and Boiing.  Check out this video of Brian Crabtree, the author of the app as well as the creator of the monome, performing a wonderful song with it.

My song isn’t exactly wonderful.  Hence the title, Cacophony.

Once I’d figured out the basics of the app I selected three samples that were semi-in-tune with each other.  Then I recorded a jam with each of the samples in “xor” and filmed the results with my camera.  After I finished recording, I imported the video and audio into final cut pro and edited each performance down to about 2-3 minutes.

Then, I basically threw caution to the wind and layered them on top of each other willy-nilly, without any concern for whether they’d match at all.  Since each recording was done at the same tempo I figured they’d sync up in some fashion.  Either way it didn’t matter to me.  This was my experiment.  I would see the results at the very end.

It ended up turning out pretty cool and interesting.  It has its ups and downs.  There are moments where they all work together making interesting rhythms and there are times where they clash.  All in all, it was pretty fun to learn “xor”.  I also created quite a bit of fodder to perhaps use in my final MCRP song.

Play the video below to enjoy the random cacophony of noises.