Random Words for Profit or Pleasure (call for participation...)

I've had some success (translation: fun) assembling recordings from friends into variously poetical compositions.  There was New Muses and there was Cloud Crowd Found Sound...

At the time of the latter, I was torn between doing it with nonsense words, or using genuine approved dictionary-grade lexemes.  Well at that time nonsense prevailed (I'm saying nothing...) but the idea of doing something similar with real words remained and now...  it may be An Idea Whose Time Has Come (tm).

If you would like to play, then you can use the link below to get a short random word list, please:

1. Click the link
2. Increase the number of words to 5 or 10
3. (Fiddle with the word-length controls if you want)
4. Click "Generate Random Words"
5. Record the words using your favourite computer or phone recording app
6. (Try to do it somewhere quiet and non-echoey)
7. If you are feeling keen, throw in a few commonplace words like "if", "but" or "was"
8. Send the result to me (message me in comments or on Facebook if don't know contact details...)

If you want to participate, here is the: LINK

FAQ:

1. What will you do with the words?
   Make some sort of post-modern poetry from them.
2. Will we get credit for our input?
   I'll put you in the credits if that's what you mean...
3. Will we get a share of the profits, then?
   Sure!  Just as soon as I've made the first million.
4. This isn't an attempt to steal our bank details then?
   Not as such, how could I——
5. Or our souls?
   OK.  Moving swiftly on...

Cloud Crowd Found Sound - 3.0 - "Eratosthenes Round Unwaltz"

Another of these, and for the moment the last. However I am already thinking of a sequel where I'll ask people to send random English phrases for me to compose together...

This time I had the idea to start with waltz rhythm.  This did not survive contact with the enemy (I am my own worst enemy) as the three-part rhythm became too fast (for human legs) and so I ended up putting four of those together to make 12/8 time.

You'll be wondering about the title...

You're not?  Do you have no spirit of enquiry!?

The Sieve of Eratosthenes is a mathematical idea for finding prime numbers: you take all the numbers except one.  Two is your first prime, so you take that, then sieve out and discard from the rest everything divisible by two.  Three is your next surviving number, so that's prime, and now you discard everything remaining that's divisible by three.  Repeat until the infinite initial pile of numbers is gone.

This piece relates to that in that I created a phrase that repeats every bar (the numbers, if you like).  Then I added a second phrase that repeats every two bars (sieving the even numbers) and another that repeats every three bars, and so on...  This means that the phrases keep coming up in different combinations and revealing themselves in new lights...

And it is a round in as much as the different voices repeat themselves, albeit with different recurrences.

I did not go on forever, you will be pleased to hear :-)

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Cast in alphabetical order of height:
Maud Cooper - Whisperphone

Simon Crowell - "Ba Da Daa"

Mary Crowell - "Beh!"

Angela van Son - "Schuft"

Cloud Crowd Found Sound - 2.0 - "Woy Oy Oy"

Another stab (with a blunt instrument) at one of these.

This time it took me longer to find a starting point that I could work from.  I decided I wanted to break the utterances down further into mostly syllables, or rather "phonemes" since we're spoken not written.

I did that and got some great sounds out of the voices, but after that I got jammed.  There were plenty of nice "melody" bits, and plenty of lovely percussive sounds, it was just that however I put the latter together it came out like somebody playing with a drum machine and failing to grasp the hotel room trashing aspect of rock and roll.

And so things stood for a few days...

And then I remembered my clarinet lessons.  A lot of clarinet music is "swing" (which means splitting each beat into 2/3 and 1/3 instead of two equal parts) and a lot of clarinet studies use cool time signatures...

So I tried 5/4 (swing) and behold...  the whole thing started to work...

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Cast

Bo Meson - Solo human voice

Rosemary Badcoe - First percussive and "Daa"

Angela van Son - Second percussive, "Hey!" and freaky laughter

Milo van Eerd - Special effects

Shouted interruption appears by kind permission of Mark Hurdiss.

Cloud Crowd Found Sound - 1.0 - "Comfrew"

Here is a first take on a piece constructed from contributed nonsense utterances...

It was harder than I thought, not least because no two pieces of the gibberish I was given were in the same language.  Ah!  I hear you quibble (don't quibble, it is unappealing)  but gibberish by definition has no language.  Well that shows how much you know:

• "Meringuephone" is clearly an English nonsense word.
• "Svertlo" is clearly not.

I attempted to structure this as a classic pop song, with verses, choruses and a break, and also percussion, and accompaniment.

I didn't do too much clever manipulation of the voices, although I did shift pitch a couple of times to let them harmonise with themselves (intensely so in one small fragment but that didn't fit and is quite far in the background).  I also stretched the duration of the odd word to allow a slight hold at the ends of phrases.

I'm well fired up by this and if people send more I will do more.

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Cast in order of appearance:

"KaKa Kaka" - Phoebe Boulton

"Folderton" - Mark Hurdiss

"Comfrew" - Thom Boulton

"Choitaak" - Rosemary Badcoe

"Muldarte" - Michael Acker

"Doolally Meringuephone" - Mike Cooper