This blog is about some of the research I’m doing for my SDT assignment. I thought it would be appropriate as a part of the ISA blogs as it is mainly about Pierre Schaffer and the audio effect techniques of his time, and Schaffer comes up a lot in what we do. On top of that, there’s just a bit of pure data, or just a GRM patch I have from time ago.
For my SDT assignment, I wanted to research more about Pierre Schaffer and the audio effect techniques that he could use in the 1940s-1960s. This is because I want to use Musique Concrete and those audio effects as the main foundation for the piece I’m creating. What I want to do with my piece right now is basically create something in the style of Musique Concrete but is actually completely opposed ideologically as I love to experience sound not necessarily for its sound but because of the context in which it was created.
My main resource was an article called “A History of Audio Effects” by Thomas Wilmering and others. After reading it I was under the impression that I could only use delays, pitch-shifting, time-shifting, and static panning. I wanted to recreate a universal phonogene in pure data but I lacked a lot of the knowledge I needed to do that, so with the help of one of my old tutors, we created one, but it was mostly them guiding me on what to do.
It was basically a sampler that would constantly loop the sample, and I could edit the pitch in real-time. It wasn’t anything you couldn’t do in a DAW, but it was fun to manipulate some of the recordings I had in such a simplified way.
A lot of the artists we talk about in the weekly “Sound Art in this Context” have something to do with Pierre Schaffer, and after it came up with Gutai and then linking Gutai to one of my favourite artists, I thought this research was the best thing to do.