There are ways to do it without having to buy extra software – free applications like Soundflower (which I think only exists for Mac) or Jack will enable you to route the output of one application, which plays the sound file, to the input of another (like Audacity, for example), which records it.Īnother, less obvious, way to ‘bend’ sound file data is to open the file in a picture editor like Photoshop, apply an effect and save the file. I use an excellent application called Wiretap Studio for this, but it isn’t freeware. The first extract is the original sound file I used the second extract is this file after processing in BBEdit Lite, played back using Videolan VLC the third extract is exactly the same BBEdit Lite file played back using Apple Quicktime, producing a significantly different result.īoth files were re-recorded to preserve these differences permanently, as described above. If you have a way of re-recording them as you play them, this would be good, as you can then save a stable file which will sound the same whenever you use it. So my next piece of advice would be to try some different applications to audition the results of your work – Windows Media Player, Audacity, VLC, Quicktime, and so on. Some of these files that you end up with can be rather unstable and may sound different depending on which application you choose to play them back in. This has the double advantage of helping me to achieve the same effect again by working out what I did to the file, and ensuring that I don’t lose an original which I might need again – either in its original form, or as the source for more experimentation. ’ rather than ‘Save’, and give the new file a name which reminds me what I’ve done to it. Occasionally you’ll end up with a file that won’t play at all, occasionally a file that sounds exactly the same as it did before – which is particularly disappointing – but usually you’ll have changed something about it in a hopefully interesting way. I’ve tried the following and got some interesting results: changing all lower case letters to uppercase changing all zeroes to 1’s changing 1’s to zeroes cutting and pasting text from other places into the middle of the file and swapping bits of the file around. Once you’ve got the file in a text editing application, however, there are many things you can do with it. The first extract is from the original sound file I used the second extract is the file opened and saved in Notepad on a PC the third extract is the file opened and saved in Wordpad. ‘.wav’ or ‘.mp3’) the same, you’ll be able to play it back. Provided you save the file as ‘text’ and keep the extension (e.g. Notepad in Windows or Text Edit on a Mac can be used in this way. Sometimes, even the mere act of opening a sound file in a text program and immediately saving it can make significant changes to the way it sounds when you play it back again. It generally looks like gobbledygook most of the the way through, although there’s occasionally a ‘header’ at the beginning with some readable stuff in it. All files can be displayed as text, as you will have noticed if you’ve ever had occasion to read one – trying to open a pdf in Word by mistake, for example. Next, what ‘other’ applications could you try? A particular technique might suit one style, but not another. Secondly, try some files with different musical content: one file with, say, fast percussive content, another with slow, sustained passages. Once you’ve tried a particular technique on two or more formats, you might decide it generally works better on one of them, and then concentrate on that one the next technique you try might work more effectively on another type. There can be a big difference in the results. įirst of all, what sort of files does it work on? I’d say you should always start by trying different formats of the same sound file – certainly an uncompressed format like aiff or wav, and a compressed format like mp3 or flac. Some good advice on how to do this can be found at. When you play it again as a sound file, it will sound different from the way it sounded originally. The basic idea of databending is very simple: open a sound file with an application it’s not meant to be opened with, change the file in a semi-random way, then save it. This post covers some non-real time methods of working on samples, often known as ‘Databending’. The third post in the series described two applications which work in real time to manipulate a single, longer sample. I also described two other applications by Karlheinz Essl and Kevin Holland (Sineqube) which work similarly, manipulating 4 samples in real time. I started talking about manipulation of samples by describing The Black Widow, a PureData patch for controlling up to 4 samples using a flight simulator-type joystick control, and the Black Widow II, with improved features and an automatic mode.
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