Disquiet Junto 0629 Jigsaw Puzzle
I tried to think about what putting a puzzle together is like. You dump all the pieces on a table. You start looking for the edges, then put together continguous sections. You come back to the sections you have a good start on and try to connect them. You end up looking at a single piece over and over a few times to try a fit. What does that look like in audio?
I took an already phrenetic “song” from years ago, and sliced it into nearly evenly sized pieces in Simpler (Ableton Live). It’s mapped to a keyboard, but it’s not randomized, like you would have with a puzzle on a table when you dump the pieces out. So I put a randomizer on the track so that even if the pieces are triggering in sequence, you’re going to get a random sample slice (at first). Then I slowly reduced the randomizer chance so that sequences started to trigger in order.
Sonically, that got a little boring. So I doubled the track and started playing with a filter side chained to the track above. Maybe I was trying to simulate the confusion of looking at a puzzle in the beginning, when you’re trying to even imagine what this is supposed to look like.
I still didn’t really love what I was hearing, so I started to manipulate the samples more intentionally, as if I were auditioning them to determine where they fit in the order of things, and playing the sample before and after (imagine moving a piece around or rotating it until you have an aha moment, then moving on to the next piece).
Finally, the original piece is pieced together after the last edge is discovered.
I’m not sure I achieved what I was going for. What you imagine is always different than what comes out. If I’d chosen less frenetic source material this may have worked better. I got to explore some techniques I wouldn’t normally use though, and that was good enough for me.