Synths & Friends Halloween Challenge: Spooky Reagan - Signup Toxx Thread

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Trig Discipline: Jun 3, 2008; Please leave the room if you think this might offend you.; Grimey Drawer

idk why you want to hack on the reagans they seem p cool

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhEJ8gm8aL4

# ¿ Sep 9, 2022 00:04

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 13:46

Trig Discipline: Jun 3, 2008; Please leave the room if you think this might offend you.; Grimey Drawer

Cabbages and Kings posted:

Also adding this to the OP:

I have made a folder for shared samples, just because I started slicing up "Evil Empire" and I realized I am going to make a lot of samples and probably not use very many of them. Also couldn't help but think about the Hinckley discussion when I was making a clip of "I understand how Abraham Lincoln Felt"....

Here is the folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BLfV7ROuAbph8mbMQvWO2SA1l1CGC_Ws?usp=sharing

I think I have this set up so that anyone with the link is an editor of this folder, and a viewer of my folder. I will probably keep adding samples there, but if you'd like to do the same to make this easier for others, please make a folder with your name, then you can upload to it and maybe tweak the perms on the subfolder to keep someone from getting the link and nuking it. In any case if people start using this I will backup elsewhere to prevent that.

All my samples are mono @ 16 / 44.1 because that's what the VPME QD wants

I don't know if I'm going to have time to participate in this one but in case anyone is new to this sort of samplefuckery I did a quick rundown of my workflow from Son of Strelka and Hardcore Prophecy. Details are in subtitles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTSFDMfEjqQ

Building sample libraries this way can be really time consuming but the assembly part is basically like magnetic fridge poetry if you've put your library together right.

A few years ago I did a proof of concept using google's speech-to-text API to automatically process a bunch of Attenborough speech and it went okay. It saved a shitload of time in library prep but the accuracy was only about 80% so there was a bit of guess-and-hope when it came to actually using the text.

Trig Discipline fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Sep 11, 2022

# ¿ Sep 11, 2022 22:32

Trig Discipline: Jun 3, 2008; Please leave the room if you think this might offend you.; Grimey Drawer

Oh man, I haven't thought about the Subgenius stuff in a bit. Negativland was doing pretty much the same thing around the same time, and were Subgenii themselves. For those who don't know them, they are actually responsible for delineating and defending many of the rights associated with sampling music and fair use that we mostly take for granted. They seemed to make a hobby of trying to get sued by the biggest names possible, including U2, Pepsi, Disney, and their own record label SST.

I'm actually giving a talk on the manipulation of the spoken word in November so if anyone wants to chime in with notable examples I'd be extremely grateful!

# ¿ Sep 19, 2022 10:58

Trig Discipline: Jun 3, 2008; Please leave the room if you think this might offend you.; Grimey Drawer

petit choux posted:

Provide a few more details and I'll try. I'd PM you about it but I haven't won yet and I don't have 10$ to buy plat RN.

Basically it's just a talk about exactly what's going on in this thread - taking a bunch of spoken word and cutting it to say something entirely new, usually in the context of satire. I was planning to talk about Negativland, The Evolution Control Committee, Cassetteboy and my own stuff in the same vein. I think my slot's only about twenty minutes so it's not exactly going to be a deep dive and a lot of it's going to focus on Son of Strelka/Hardcore Prophecy, but I do want to hit the big highlights of the "genre" as a whole before drilling in on my own work.

The "genre" is in quotes because I don't know of a single catchall term for this sort of samplefuckery, but one of the points I'm going to touch on toward the end is that it might be on its way to being a dying art form before it ever became all that popular; the advent of machine learning-based methods increasingly allows people to say anything they want in any voice they want, without hours (or in my case hundreds of hours because I'm weird like that) of cutting, pasting, and tweaking.

Then I'm going to sort of end on what's lost when you do it that way. Doing this kind of audio manipulation is always a negotiation with the source material, where it feels like you're trying to make the story go in a given direction and the source material is fighting back or maybe pointing a different way entirely. The story you end up telling is never what you would have come up with if you just sat down and started typing, and that's kinda the beauty of it.

I'm hoping I can get illustrations done for my new Attenborough thing (https://soundcloud.com/danwarren/attenboroughs-monsters) in time, because for that one I used the Google speech-to-text API to automate the library creation, which is by far the most onerous part of the process. I feel like that's a really cool sort of optimistic "maybe new advances can actually help this sort of audio collage be more accessible to people who want to try it" take-home that will counteract the voice synthesis stuff. Also the main audience will be scientists so I think they'll dig it.

edit: On a side note, I'm a scientist myself and Son of Strelka actually appears on my Google Scholar page because it's been cited in a few academic works.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2022 12:51

Trig Discipline: Jun 3, 2008; Please leave the room if you think this might offend you.; Grimey Drawer

petit choux posted:

Oh wow, thanks for the detailed answer. And I didn't know you were a scientist, I'll try to be a little more careful next time!

I've given this an awful lot of thought, but instead of focusing on the potential of this little medium, being an art school dropout I was focused on the historical and artistic precedent. Our big thing back then was comparing the medium of audio collage to precedent in the visual arts, particularly Kurt Schwitters, Robert Rauschenberg, all the best of the guys and dolls that worked with "found material" in the early 20th C and did a lot to shape the visual arts. Pop art, and of course you may recall that the subgenius people called their art "Bulldada," so a lot of reverence for the most irreverent genre ever to have existed.

But there was also a lot of easy and substantial "artistic" precedent in the political recordings (ED: I think my recollection was a little unclear. Now that I'm remembering them a little bit better, they were not usually political so much as about hot topics for the time, sometimes political.) Not that it's of much significance nowadays but I'm 60 and when I was a little boy I used to love that tacky stuff, it was probably from a very small number of people, It was really lowbrow, but it was basically audio political cartoons using samples taken from virtually anywhere. I bet the people doing it have documented their efforts to some extent. I recall made-up interviews with political (ED: and celebrities) figures where they took all the answers from utterances popular in the media, played in a humorous context. It was really about as lowbrow as political cartooning typically goes. But prior to Morning Zoo type shows, there would be loud, obnoxious DJs in the booth having fun and playing goofy poo poo like that. It was full of the most popular soundbytes and memes that the "artists" could find. It was something along these lines: a fictional newscaster is interviewing Jimmy Carter and Jaws the movie has just come out and everybody is crazy to go see Jaws. So they ask the president how he feels about his polls, and his response is the guy from jaws saying "we need a bigger boat" or something, ka-kow. So pretty much the level of intellect you'd find in a lot of Twitter reaction videos. And it really worked for 6-year old me with my first tape recorder. And it was really effective at spreading memes and political biases.

The thing I'd maybe suggest, since you're a professor and all, would be maybe a little Ken Nordine. He did not work with audio recordings beyond his own voice, and his big thing was reworking words, phrases and ideas into different contexts. I'm sure you'll remember him if you hear him, he was one of the most popular voiceover people in advertising in the 80s-90s. The act of de- and re-contextualizing words or phrases and the resulting sweet confusion is one of the biggest parts of it, and what made Ken so amusing, in addition to his good voice. (just look up Ken Nordine on Youtube, maybe try "word jazz."

But I just went off on my hobby horse a little bit there. I might have some more useful suggestions but I had to get that off my chest. Cheers

ED: I think my description of the tape editing things above was mostly accurate but they weren't mostly political. I do recall some being specifically political but mostly they were about popular topics.

Oh this is awesome info, thanks! It's still two months away so I do have a bit of time to look back into this stuff a bit. My biggest issue is going to be fitting the hour's worth of stuff I want to say and show into the twenty or so minutes I'll actually have.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2022 23:32

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