SONG:
ARTIST: grant.
SOURCE: Scientific American 6 Dec 2021, “Pompeii’s Ruins to Be Reconstructed by Robot,” as used in the post ‘A robot will be rebuilding Pompeii from fragments.‘
ABSTRACT: This song, weirdly, was sort of finished before it was done, and then nearly wasn’t finished at all. What had happened was that I, pretty early in the month, completed an instrumental track – two drums with a little roomy experiment going on in the mix, a bass line, a mellotron, and this kind of fake eBow lead melody that sounded like a kind of non-virtuoso Joe Satriani kind of thing (fewer notes, if you know what I mean, but the same tone) that just sat there juuuust right in the mix, and it was like a done thing.
But this is not an instrumental project. It requires words.
And I wasn’t super moved by most of the recent science I posted here, to be honest. It was interesting enough, but all kind of things I’d done before, musically. The robot putting Pompeii together, that was cool, yeah. So I poked a little at that. I kind of forgot it wasn’t like a Mars rover and was more like a torso with hands, fingers, and scanners at first, so started thinking about the first verse in terms of mapping, of navigating a grid, but that’s fine, I re-read the article a couple times, and scanning little pieces and scanning a landscape are kind of the same on a digital level.
Then, on the day I’d set aside to really hammer out the words and sing a few tracks, I got sideswiped by a neighbor throwing a party (I think maybe renting out his back yard – there were several tents, and trucks, and a PA and DJ) that went from 4 in the afternoon to 2:30 in the morning, at a volume measured inside my workspace on a little phone app at around 55 dB (it was in the high 60s, low 70s outside the house). Such are the risks of living in unincorporated county land. As a result, things got a little rushed here in the sonic labs once that interference had passed.
I also got slowed down earlier in the month by getting accidentally and overwhelmingly earwormed by that old Imogen Heap acapella-with-harmonizer hit “Hide and Seek.” A song about robots kind of goes with that sound… but I don’t have that hardware. I’ve got some free effects on my computer. So here’s how that went down.
First, a harmonized track. I fed the eBow track into two pitch-shifters, one 5 steps up and the other 2 steps down. Made a nice chord, at least for the choruses. Then, a vocoder track – using that eBow lead as the synthy input and whispered vocals – not just soft, but literally whispered – as the vocal being modulated. Well, that made an interesting sound, but it wasn’t exactly legible. Couldn’t quite make out the words unless I upped the volume on the whispers to the point that it started sounding like a council of snakes. So, lying here, laptop on my chest, I then sung a melodic vocal to match the vocoded vocal, and put that sung vocal through autotune and an echo. Two kinds of “robot-sounding” vocals sounding great together.
I’m hoping ear fatigue hasn’t warped my sense of the mix too badly. It sounds good to me tonight. Now, to sleep.
LYRICS:
V1: Circle time / Find the winding sidewalks
Trace the lines / Transepts laid in code
Gravel gloves / Dusty plugs and rusted railings
Broken signs / a past in layered ashPRE-CH: Buried there, beyond repair, Waiting for 2,000 years
Soft machines, behind the scenes, Calculating smithereens
CH: In Pompeii – Make the puzzle pieces work
In Pompeii – Pieces sifted from the dirt
In Pompeii…V2: Plastic eyes / Digitize the pieces
Flakes of paint/ Cracks in plaster walls
Sensor hands / To lift and shift the fragments
Sleepless nights / Assembling our pastPRE-CH: Buried there, beyond repair, Waiting for 2,000 years
Soft machines, behind the scenes, Calculating smithereens
CH: In Pompeii – Make the puzzle pieces work
In Pompeii – Pieces sifted from the dirt
In Pompeii…