yucky_mp3_drumLoopGoToWifi60perPacketLoss-4.13_Beckstrom.wav

I've been experimenting with glitch music and sounds, and it occurred to me that what better distortion/glitch speaks to our current times than a poor audio quality video call?

I set up a GoTo Meeting from my Linux music computer to a Windows laptop, sending audio from Linux to Windows via the meeting audio. I also used some networking tools to cause packet loss, meaning not all the data I sent from Linux actually arrived at the Windows machine. This caused a variety of artefacts that are well-known to anyone who has had a poor quality video call (I think at this point that would be most of us). The output of the Windows laptop went into an analog mixer and then back into Linux, where I recorded the glitchy sounds in the Ardour DAW.

The source material is a variety of sounds and loops I've created; a lot of TR-808 drum loops, some sounds from my homemade modular synthesizer, my Korg Volca keys, and some random samples I had laying around.

Once I sliced the samples and had a number of WAV files, I ran a script I wrote to degrade the sounds using bad MP3 compression.

I think this was an interesting experiment, and I think I'll get some mileage out of these weird style of distortion/degradation. I hope you will too!

- Chris Beckstrom
chrisbeckstrom.com