the SOUNDRY COURTER project FAQ December 2003
the SOUNDRY COURTER project
F A Q*
1. What is it? ...and keep it short, I don't want your life story.
The Soundry Courter Project is a recording project that I only do when I'm at work.
We use Windows NT at my job, and all modern versions of Windows come with the Sound Recorder program.
Over the years, I've devised a system of makeshift step-recording to create short pieces of music.
Click here for another version of the explanation--this time, in a letter to Negativland.
2. OK, but what programs do you use? Are you sure you didn't use the Frooty Loops demo to make this stuff?
The only programs I've ever used to create these pieces are:
SOUND RECORDER
CD PLAYER
MEDIA PLAYER
CALCULATOR
...and that's it.
3. Where do you get your samples from?
All of the sounds in the Soundry Courter Project are sampled from outside sources-- CD's and MP3's of other artists.
As it stands today, I have sampled 2,158 songs, mostly from my own CD collection. In addition, I have sampled movies and TV (from anonymous internet MP3 rips), video games (from my own home-burned audio collection), and radio (accomplished by plugging an AM radio directly into the sound card). There are 12 sources as yet unaccounted for--in most cases, because they were sampled from a borrowed CD, and I can't remember who I borrowed the CD from.
4. You didn't answer my question.
The Soundry Courter project is influenced and inspired by many songs, I can tell you that much.
5. How many songs are there?
As of Valentine's Day 2004, there are 296 Soundry Courter songs.
Every so often (usually when my paranoia gets the best of me), I'll "evacuate" the completed songs off of my work computer, where they are stored. Since they are all in WAV format, they are much too large to send by e-mail. Unfortunately, the earliest pieces are horribly distorted--a result of my inexperience with a minidisc recorder. I borrowed one from Quentin, my roommate at the time, and took it to work; surreptitiously recording all my songs while pretending to work.
For a while, I used the AOL instant messenger to file-transfer the songs home (where I had another instant messenger running), which worked great; however, running any non-work programs is one of the things I eventually got busted for. (Nobody said anything about a built-in Microsoft program called Sound Recorder...)
I have since returned to the minidisc method, now that I have a better understanding of input levels.
(Thanks to Damian for letting me use his clanky and awkward console model)
6. Is it just noise music, or what?
No, not really. Most of the songs have a "techno" (whatever that means) bent to them, but since they are built of such disparate samples, the timbre is very hard to describe. Sometimes, there are many different rhythms working together, yet each one is from a song in a completely different key. Not only that, but in the case of "constructed" beats (meaning built piece-by-piece by me, and not a drum loop that I've sampled), each piece of the drum set is from a totally different song, creating a very unique and disorienting audio palette.
==MORE FAKE Q & A COMING SOON!==
Why wait? Send in some actual questions!
Click here for a complete list of every Soundry Courter song to date
*I find most FAQs suspect of just being easy ways to organize a bio, and this FAQ is no exception. Frankly, it's just MUCH easier than actual writing.
