crow caw music works

Here’s a later (29 Apr 2009) cut at a remix of the Buddha Machine version 2.0 loop set. Once you click on the play control on the gadget, give it a few seconds to start. It’s also not terribly loud, so if you’re in a noisy environment you may have to turn up your computer’s volume a bit

A little further down on this page I give some details as to how I produced it.

What’s a Buddha Machine?

If you haven’t heard about the “Buddha Machine“, click on the link and be amazed.

If you’re too lazy to go there; in a nutshell it’s a little plastic box about the size of a transistor radio (ha! who remembers those?!). It has built into it several short sound loops that repeat endlessly. It sounds like some kind of torture device, but the producers (FM3) have carefully created the loops so that they are soothing and aleatoric.

They have also generously provided the loops for download for people to use in their own work. I started working on a piece based on them a few weeks ago. It’s hard to nail down a final arrangement, due to the quasi-ambient nature of it, but I will try to get something finished soon and make it available to hear here.

Oh, incidentally: they released a “2.0″ version in late 2008. Here is a writeup, I forget where I got it, which discusses the loops from the “1.0″ version in some detail. (Sorry it’s not attributed yet, once I dig up its source I’ll make it right.)

“Secrets of the Buddha Machine”

(Yes, it’s in “.odt” (Open Document) format…it’s a wordpress thing. See this page for info about OpenOffice which is a pretty cool thing.)

Available on bandcamp too

As of Jun 27, this track can also be streamed or downloaded from the tim p scott page at bandcamp; http://tim-p-scott.bandcamp.com/album/work-in-progress-2009

Production Notes

The track was assembled in Ableton Live 7.0.10. All the audio components I used are either license free or shareable under Creative Commons licenses. I’m not really trying to make a point, except that it’s wonderful that people make content available for free. In the early days, you had to pay through the nose for sample and loop libraries that were any good. Although I paid (big $) for Ableton Live, since it’s my favorite tool, there are plenty of other ways to assemble music for cheap or free.

I started with the set of downloaded loops that FM3 graciously provided under a Creative Commons license.

Here’s the link to the zip file which contains them (it’s in MP3 format so it’s not too huge): http://www.fm3buddhamachine.com/site/wp-content/uploads/2008_20xx_images/buddhamachine2mp3.zip

The version of the Creative Commons license they are distributed under, which affects the status of my “remix” is “by-nc-sa”, which is explained here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

Basically, I used all the loops in the archive except one, which I couldn’t get to fit anywhere.

In addition, I used a couple other free things. On another page on this site I discuss the “One Laptop Per Child” (OLPC) free sample set. I used a sample from composer Risto Holopainen’s collection: http://www.archive.org/details/RistoHolopainen

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