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sonicgarbage.greg.technology

121 pointsgregsadetsky48 comments

Love this we need more creative audio projects! Great work!!

I was inspired by the demo Colugo Music shared over the weekend and made a variation on Sunday and shared a link to it and the code yesterday: https://danielraffel.me/2023/11/21/sonic-garbage/

Demo here: https://polymetallic.co

Every time someone visits my variation of SonicGarbage, it performs a YouTube search with randomly generated phrases to discover videos. It then downloads these videos, processes their audio, and converts them into a loop. The site then generates a unique timestamped URL hosting each sample loop that was generated and adds it to an archive of random YouTube sample packs.

Since this is running on a free tier Google micro instance it takes close to a minute to run this process. So, when you visit you'll be enjoying a page of samples generated by the last person who visited.

You can trigger and loop the sounds by clicking and hovering over the YouTube IDs, simulating a live sampler. Right-clicking the IDs allows you to download the looped sample files. I didn't bother to optimize for mobile so it's desktop only right now...sorry!

Kudos to Colugo Music for inspiring so many of us!

Hey Daniel, congrats on your work and nice to see you here! Definitely, Colugo hit the audio project idea bullseye with this one :)

Let’s talk / collab if you want / have time!

suggestion: when you click to loop a sound, the URL should update with the current state of everything you have selected. Then you could send the URL to other people and they could listen to your garbage.

Really great idea, thanks a lot! I’ll add this.

Really enjoy playing with this. As others have noted, would find it more usable if the colors indicated source types (but acknowledge the purposeful intent to keep this instrument less predictable for the sake of playfulness).

A bit off-topic, but I might actually find this approach useful for music production, especially if I could just drag and drop a folder of samples into a grid in an M4L plugin.

Very cool - I still find Reich's looping sample experiments inspiring!

And even more off-topic (sorry!).

To this day I find pretty elemental algorithmic and/or deterministic composition experiments far more inspiring and idiosyncratic than gen AI. There is such a wide gap between gen AI sound generation and the prompter, that the result feels utterly disconnected from the composer's intent.

Toggle at least 5 or 6 items and experience what it's like to have auditory processing disorder!

This is really cool. I once made something close to this idea, but reusing youtube instead of curated samples.

youtubecore.sigil.network

Would be interesting to explore sampling loops from random videos.

This is fantastic. Selection of sounds is very interesting. It sets your brain on the quest of transderivational search, traversing his own spaces to find (derive) meaning when hearing these snippets of speech. They are ambiguous enough to really f$Y^k it up a bit, so process unfolds a bit more than usually.

Maybe currently looped squares in one column could not overlap, but that would be needed if this was some mixing table and it is not (it is a bit). It's awesome!

I really would love to hear some back story on why (eg. sounds selection).

Yes, piling up current loops in a column is a good idea - it’s been suggested before but I think that I’m “seeing” it now i.e. how to make the UI for it.

It will be more challenging on mobile but I can make the sticky looping squares smaller. Thanks!

Cool. It's awesome already (selection of sounds is the key for me). Best!

Akufen - Deck The Halls

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YKy-V4WVMc&t=1351s

Happy thanksgiving!

I’m a HUGE fan of Akufen, so this hits deep. Really grateful that you saw a connection to the project!!

ah nice. I have sonic garbage on offer as well: If y'all need/want some non-traditional didgeridoo samples for toys such as these, do contact me. Whether it's drum sounds (didgeridoo equivalent of: kick, snare, toms, roto-toms), time-insensitive drone loops or percussive molecules/textures, I'm happy to record what you need (yeah, time-boxed naturally if unpaid) for projects such as this one.

You should release them!!

I do have a future project based around samples so maybe we could collab? Reach out to me! (Email in profile)

I did reach out, look for subject '"Sonic Garbage" & Didgeridoo' in your spam folder ;)

for the record, have a look-see on what didgeridoo can sound like, you might be surprised:

- an example of 2 didgeridoos & sitar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=di5SIHXlNoU

- a solo example: https://youtu.be/41W_aDGJsOA

- my (new) YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@FreddieVeggie

- a solo didgeridoo playlist on my (old) channel: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNfYESvVk8G_-8lUiEVWt...

If you see/hear something there that's interesting to you, do contact me (e-mail on profile)

Could you please make the tiles numbered and save the set of selected tiles to the URI hash, so that I can share patches via a link

Great stuff! I would love a way to set the interval, e.g. play this sound every 4 bars. Could mash together some cool jams that way

Ah that’s really great… I might be able to do that with a keyboard shortcut - hold “4” while clicking a square and then the sample will autoloop but play only 1 times out of 4. I’ll try this!

This is really cool. I played around for a minute or so and ended up with a cute little loop that reminds me of something from Four Tet’s Pink album. It just needs some sort of analogue drum machine underneath with some subtle sidechaining on the kick and it’d be ready for general consumption. So soothing.

I saw that was cool then I realised you could scroll down. Super cool!

One bit of feedback is that as you scroll the boxes can cover each other up so maybe the UI can be tweaked to allow you to stop a sample even if it's might be coloured.

I'd like the samples I've used to show up in a history list on the right.

I was not expecting to love this and I love it. +1, I would really, really like to be able to share 'compositions'.

That’s coming! Thank you!

Inspired work

The Sonic Garbage Curse of Kazar

https://soundcloud.com/hocus-locus/the-sonic-garbage-curse-o...

no looping just mashup

I have a bookmarks folder named Coolness, and this project is going into it

Are the colours supposed to mean anything? It would be useful to tell at a glance roughly the type of sound I'm going to get (male voice, female voice, instrument, percussion, machine noise, etc)

The colors are random, but I agree with you. I was considering doing some twee basic spectral analysis and using that to inform the colors. I’ll look into it!

Thanks for the suggestion

Maybe it’s a mobile thing, but some of the loops (maybe limited to the double-time ones) can eventually get off beat.

Yes the loops are not all exactly the same length so drifting can definitely happen.

There’s another comment here suggesting to fix the looping interval so that all samples will play on a regular bpm, but it does introduce a bit of complexity in terms of how to implement and interact with that different way of looping.

Decided to look into greg

Clicked his instagram, first video is a live comedy performance introduced by Matthew Silver..

greg is pretty cool

Your comment prompted me to click around. Teeth ventriloquist was an experience.

Thank you haha. I really liked that sketch but yes, it’s demanding (of the audience) :)

Extreme thanks!!! I’m actually performing tonight at another Matt Silver show. Video should be up soon after :)

Cheers!!

I got a clip looping just the word "raped" and then I quit immediately. Not cool.

nice job, greg. i'm a sample mangler so this is very cool :)

what's the source material, youtube vids?

A song from samples like this in the style of Aphex Twin would be cool.

This is great fun! Thanks for creating and sharing this!

I think I made a post-guitar radiohead track.

I would really like undo functionality.

Ah, really interesting! Ctrl/Cmd-Z to stop the last clicked loop?

To undo any action

But how would that work with the mouse over event? I.e. I can’t undo that a user is currently hovering over a square. The only thing I see that could be undone is the clicking.

Let me know if I’m missing something and how should undo work. Thanks!

Yep, any clicking. I perceive mouseover events as just previews

very cool. what's the relationship between the colour and sound? just random?

Random for now but will look into making it a little bit more correlated. Thanks!

My wife just looked at me and said that needs to stop, the sounds need to die.

My cat said the same thing.

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