Experimental music with convolution
"Call from the Crowd"

Keywords:

Impulse Response, Convolution, Soundscape, Experimental Music, Ableton Live



This piece of experimental music is inspired by both the song I am Sitting in a Room (1969), by Alvin Lucier and the book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1897) - Psychologie des Foules / Psychology of Crowds, by Gustave Le Bon that unfolds an imaginary story about a character and his experience of hypnotized and murdered by the call from the crowd.

When I first got to know convolution, it was more on a conceptual level and tools help me to understand it are on the visual side, for example, applying it to images or the visualization of the histogram of probability distributions after applying convolution. I got surprised when we got exposed to I am Sitting in a Room by Alvin Lucier during the class. The bell-like sound (Lucier, 1969) we heard as the song progressed, which is inspirational to me. Instead of starting from the raw recording, I started with the crowd sample I found in Ableton’s built-in library with 12 times of convolution reverb. Connecting with the surprise I got during the first listening, the main character also got surprised and attracted when he heard the 12 times convolved sound. With a simile of imagining the sound of a crowd as a ray of energy that can move with its will, as the sound approaches the space where the main character was, the 12 times convolved sound becomes a mixture of 5 times convolved crowd noise and raw recording. The sound knocked on his door. The main character walked towards the door and opened it.

Going into the second phase of my project, the space opens, he entered a square with people passing by and got immersed in the noise made by the crowd. Compared to the clear footstep sounds the main character made before, the walking sound from the main character in the crowd is still the same, while the space and directional information got eliminated, which I got inspired by the claim that individuality got undermined when inside the crowd (Le Bon, 1897). The mixture of 4 kinds of noise created by the crowd with panning and 1 track of 5 times convolved crowd noise, the story embraces its peak. The entire storyline is a shadow of a shorter period amount of time of how an individual got unconsciously attracted by the crowd; became hypnotized and followed the power; eventually got destroyed by the loss of self in the crowd.

The main character I have in the story, although I used “he”, is designed to be a conceptual character, like a Matchstick Man that doesn’t have gender features. He is intended to be a more abstract concept. I had a brief idea about the plots of this project at the relative beginning; however, filling the flesh into a skeleton was a long process. I experienced several impulse response filters to explore what would be an ideal starting position for me at the beginning, but I ended up adding more convolutional layers to create a general and powerful sound instead of having only one or two layers that make the audience focuses more on the space itself at the beginning.