Weekend Inspiration: Coke Bottle as Tribal Percussion, and the Future of Adaptive Music
Troels Folmann is one of our favorite composers at CDM. The fact that he’s a game composer both incidental and essential — it’s not that he’s scoring a Tomb Raider title that matters, it’s that game composition requires a new, fluid way of thinking about form, and Dr. Folmann (he did a dissertation topic on the subject) is up to the challenge.
Digging through recent entries on Troels’ blog is definitely a source of weekend inspiration. I’m fond of found samples, but I tend to record sound making things around the house up close with a mobile recorder for a more intimate sound. Troels drags them over to a concert hall and uses the natural reverb to turn a candle light holder and Coke bottle into something that sounds like massive, tribal percussion. To keep himself disciplined, he limited himself to objects in a random photo. Here’s what it sounds like:
To add to the ambience, he uses the Timefreezer plug-in ($99 for Mac, Windows, Mac Intel, the lot). As the name implies, it “freezes” samples of sound as an effect or instrument. I’ve done some similar things as DIY patches, but it sounds like they’ve done a nice job of implementation.
This approach to sampling percussion with natural reverb, and making an art of the samples, is part of why they pay Troels the big bucks. Be sure to hear his percussion demo for more of the sounds. Little wonder that he blogs the meditation on autism that’s been making the YouTube rounds: sampling sounds requires an almost extrasensory focus on the world around us that we spend most of our time shutting out.
So there you have some fiddling with household objects. What about this “future of adaptive music” business?
/* Buy links if custom fields not null and not in cat or search results */ ?> /* End Buy links if custom fields not null and not in cat or search results */ ?>





The music technology blogosophere continues to expand, now with an excellent new site dedicated to film scoring. The site also has a bonus: its name begins with the word “Create”, which means it can join CDM’s unofficial “Create [Stuff]” network! 



Cult-hit-before-it-was-even-released movie
And Rabin is a Mac guy. His studio Jacaranda Studios is powered by 







