Found Art and Creativity

Recently I posted a track featuring iPad app ‘Fluss’. The app was designed in part with the help of renowned composer Hainbach. The subject of this post: creativity and ‘found art’. Regarding issues of ownership and credibility.

The track garnered some attention, mostly due to the beauty of the
sampled works. A flute preset, the samples have a haunting beauty to them. Some kind of special trill was used and no doubt a very nice orchestral recording date.

The app is a granular load sample and tweak style. So the coders designed a bunch of very good orchestral and synth samples. A handful of knobs (not too many) for turning and tweaking as you watch the .wav granules collide with the original and create temporary destructions and mutations. As someone with a cinematic imagination, I find this work fascinating.

I got in the habit of modifying synth presets so it sounds different than the factory settings. But for that Fluss based recording, I did not even tweak the sample file. The pitches were input with the iPad keyboard, but I did not adjust a filter or a resonance or anything. I suppose in this case, beauty is indeed, in the ....( well, perhaps someone will use the suggested saying for a wikiloops targetted composition.)

Found art and creativity is an interesting collision area. If you dive into vsts or synths, you’ll find the amount of presets and sounds staggering. Sculpting my own sonics is a much more rewarding process to me, but I still rely on the original factory presets in many cases.

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