[ambient] Invocation (MP3/FLAC) spectal chant mashup

[DaveSeidel]

This piece combines Quranic recitation and Tibetan Buddhist chant, processed with time stretching and spectral smoothing.  Hope you enjoy it.

MP3, FLAC, liner notes, Csound code at:
http://mysterybear.net/article/36/invocation

[Sam_Zen]

Nice description there. I like to know more about 'spectral smoothing'.
Is this a special audio application, or what ? It smells like the 'blur' function in a graphic editor.

[uncloned]

I rather like this spooky piece.


as far as I know he is using some sophisticated processing in Csound.

Are you familiar with that application Sam?


It is really powerful - much like a ray tracing program for sound.

[Sam_Zen]

edit: yep, I know about Csound.

Listening. Of course chants material like this will create a certain atmosphere.
But I think the choice of time-stretching is the main compositional aspect here.
A track is stretched from its original 5:38 to 8:16. Then other material is stretched to that 8:16 too.

This apart from final production work of course. Enjoyed it.

[DaveSeidel]

Nice description there. I like to know more about 'spectral smoothing'.
Is this a special audio application, or what ? It smells like the 'blur' function in a graphic editor.

All done in Csound, using the phase vocoder opcodes, both the smoothing and the time stretching.  The smoothing is done with pvsmooth (there's another opcode called pvsblur, they're a little different).  It probably is analogous in some way to blurring in image processing.