I heard a performance of John Cage’s 4’33” played by a symphony orchestra. The audience obediently remained perfectly quiet during it, behaving as expected of an orchestra audience. Cage, of course, hoped the audience would pay attention to any sounds that happened during 4’33”. I heard a medical device clicking periodically. That was sort of magical for me.

I like to listen to the sounds of an orchestra getting ready to play, every musician tooting and bowing away as they wish. I also enjoy the cacophony made by an audience, prior to and in between performances of music.

This piece, my 3’44”, contains that duration of sound, interspersed with three minutes of silence. I tried to simulate the sound of an audience mindlessly jabbering away.

The patch, or how the sound was made

I chose Granular Cloud mode from the Michigan Synth Works Beehive Plaits clone. The Timbre and Morph parameters are modified by slewed, random voltages.

The main output of Beehive is patched to Qu-Bit Aurora‘s input. Aurora’s stereo output to Qu-Bit Data Bender input; Data Bender outputs to White Rabbit hall reverb, then to NANO CEQ, on to WORNG MidSide+, then Three Tom Doppio to the final output.

There is a slow LFO on Aurora’s Blur parameter. And a random LFO on MidSide+’s Width parameter. Data Bender is bending at its internal clock rate. After lots of tweaking, especially to Beehive. I have the following result.