TheBrokenMusicBox: an online looping experiment

["loop.pool" <looppool@cruzio.com>]

I discovered a very cool free sample site last night
http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/
run coincidentally by my friend Bram who is one of the freeware plugin 
developers at the marvelous SmartElectronix.com collective.

One of the interesting things about the site is that you can preview the 
free samples there by either triggering them as a one shot or
by hitting a loop button and then triggering them as a continuous loop.

I was searching for toy piano, music box,  old wheezy organ and out of 
tune 
piano samples because, hey,  I'm weird
and so I found a sample pack of Toy Music Box samples.

Much to my delight I discovered that I could improv on the site by turning 
the loops of the individual Music Box notes on and off.
I also discovered that I could run as many loops as I felt like it in real 
time.

So the tune is in the spirit of the real time looping (in this case using 
my 
mouse and my computer only)

It's called  "The Broken Music Box" and if you are curious,  below is the 
process I used to improvised the piece.
It's free to download and hear at   www.looppool.info/TheBrokenMusicBox/

I hope you like it.

**************

Here's a description of my unconventional process:

I used the preview looping capabilties of the FREESOUND site to do an 
improv 
with all of the toy music box samples...............looping and turning on 
and off the various samples, running simultaneously............I recorded 
this improv in real time into Sound Forge.

Then I took that improv and played it back in real time as I used the 
mouse 
to
grab the moving cursor and manipulate it in ways that screwed up the 
computer
(I even crashed it with the blue screen of death once...........I'm never 
even seen a blue
screen as long as I've run Win XP.............lol).

I love this technique for confusing the computer while playing back in 
Sound 
Forge.

all of this I recorded into Cool Edit Pro (because Sound Forge won't allow 
multiple instances
to run simultaneously.

I took the results and then basically just slashed sections out of it 
until 
I like the final result..................then I threw it into Fruity Loops 
and played with speed of play back and triggering heavily verbed instances 
of the tracks: sometimes synchonously, sometimes not.

Next, I tried to think of what Ravel would do to the piece if he were 
alive 
today and I wrote the String parts in Fruity Loops.

Everything I did with a mouse and the computer.

It's sort of neo classical/glitch music and is pretty outside of the 
mainstream but I'm really happy with it.