In Praise of Noise

In Praise of Noise - An Introduction.

A million or so years ago I read a fantastic book while in art school called "In Praise of Shadows", by Tanizaki Junichiro (translated by Harper and Seidensticker). The TLDR: imperfection and dirt are good. I highly recommend reading this short book as a meditative, philosophical exercise, or watch the video linked below for a similar, contemplative experience.

In Praise of Shadows: Tanizaki Junichio - video on Archive.org

What does embracing imperfection have to do with electronic music? At a time where any DAW or hardware can reproduce anything perfectly and exactly the same, time and again, one might find themselves drawn to believe that greater precision and better quality results from flawless perfection. High-quality digital audio (and its creation) can be thought to equate with perfection, but it doesn't need to. 

Conversely, the idea of analog audio often conjures mental images of warmth, high-fidelity, and a different sort of quality, possibly even a bit of pretentiousness- but I think this is only true if one is choosing to equate quantity of money spent on gear or plugins with the quality of the music which results from those purchases.

When I started creating electronic music, I came from playing classical French Horn, had serious misconceptions about how synthesizers worked, and started primarily "in the box". I used Reason which emulates a hardware environment with skeuomorphic representations of different devices and instruments. I was naive and inexperienced and had only a basic appreciation of what an audio filter did or how anything worked. With basic experimentation (and a lot of questionable results), I gained some knowledge of different filtering applications (Low Pass, High Pass, Band, etc.), but I never understood the how, why, or historical context of the circuits these effects were originally based upon.

When I started to use VCV Rack and Bitwig Studio, I was intrigued because there were different, specific filter types to choose from. I became curious. What was a Ladder Filter? Why was an Oberheim filter different from an ARP, or a Moog filter? (In the case of ARP and Moog the answer was, for a time, no difference whatsoever.) The real answer was, of course, money, IP, and the commercialisation of electronic instruments. The over-simplified answer being that each manufacturer engineered their own circuit designs. The granular, modular arrangement of individual electronic components and the fundamental properties of different types (and brands) of transistor-based circuitry combined with resistors, capacitors and diodes when put together in specific arrangements (called topologies) made for distinctive and unique sounds which we now associate with musical genres and even specific musical groups. And sometimes, if you made something with circuits which weren't even really meant to be used that way (but were really cheap to source), it meant that you ended up with something rather special and different. (Looking at you Sherman Filterbank!).

Should you care why a certain circuit sounds the way it does? Not really, but if you are curious, there are heaps of wonderful resources to educate yourself with. As I fell down one rabbit hole after another, I found that I wanted to know why things sounded the way they do. I felt like I began to understand what the electrons were doing. The wibbles and oscillatory imperfections of filtered tones and sounds began to have names and personalities and while I have no real patience (or budget, time or space) to start building my own circuits, there are ways to emulate this in Bitwig Studio or VCV (or Cardinal) Rack, and probably any other DAW you care to name if you are resourceful enough to start poking about and find ways to make things happen. 

What follows is my own sketchbook of ideas and recipes for sound design, music creation, and curiosities. As much as possible I will make use of FOSS so that anyone can replicate my ideas for themselves on Linux, Mac, or Windows. We will begin with a simple exercise.

Chapter 1: Vinyl Crackle (mono or stereo)

Let's make some vinyl crackle (like you would get with a dusty vintage vinyl record) using the Free and Open Source Cardinal Rack (free version of VCV Rack which runs on Linux, Windows or Mac). You can build the patch for yourself, or you can download my Vinyl Crackle patch for free and jump right in.