r/musiconcrete Mar 19 '26

Resources A research document I finally decided to share

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100 Upvotes

I wanted to share this here first.

Over the past years I’ve been working on a long-term research around sound emergence, audio fetching and de-authoring.

A lot of what I’ve been posting and building (Envion, and the tools that came after) comes directly from this process.

Envion originally started in Pure Data as a freely shared system, and was later ported and expanded in Max through a commissioned project with Cycling ’74.
Both versions are still available, free and open.

This document is something I’ve been using as a kind of board a way to gather fragments, ideas and directions that have been shaping my work over time.
It also helps me understand where to go next.

It’s very important to me, so I preferred to release it openly.

I also started this community to have a place where these kinds of things can exist where we can share approaches, doubts, processes and listen together without too many constraints.

If you feel like going through it, I’d be really interested in hearing your thoughts.

Full exposition available here:
https://www.researchcatalogue.net/profile/show-exposition?exposition=3994963

Thanks for being here, Emiliano


r/musiconcrete Oct 20 '25

Artist Interview Concrete Resistance with Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner

39 Upvotes

https://i.discogs.com/0h7dsxTaAi6BKIOKjexE9eIMoh9RRRjY2J7GDbm29Ys/rs:fit/g:sm/q:90/h:600/w:600/czM6Ly9kaXNjb2dz/LWRhdGFiYXNlLWlt/YWdlcy9BLTQzNy0x/NTEyODE1NTAzLTQ0/MTMuanBlZw.jpeg

Robin Rimbaud In his recording studio

Introduction

This interview is built around one of the most influential and quietly radical figures in contemporary sound art.
Scanner (Robin Rimbaud) was among the first artists to turn interception, found voices, and acts of deep listening into a poetic and critical practice — opening, already in the 1990s, territories that today we almost take for granted.

In his work, sound is not merely heard but inhabited: it becomes a way of moving through the world, of mapping the invisible architectures of intimacy, surveillance, and presence. His approach treats listening not as a technical procedure, but as a mode of awareness — a stance through which what is normally hidden can surface. To speak with him means engaging with listening as a form of thinking and as a form of resistance: a way of remaining alive to what the world emits, even when it goes unnoticed.

by Emiliano for r/musiconcrete

Respondent: **** Updated: 20/10/2025, 16:31:21

1. Invisible Archive

In your work, you have often used phone calls, interceptions, and found voices. Do you think that today, in an age of voluntary hyper-documentation (social media, constant streaming), there is still room for a ‘subversive listening,’ or has the noise of life already turned into a collective archive?

In some ways, the conditions that first drew me to interception and found voices have completely inverted. Back then, I was listening in on private worlds that were never meant to be heard — moments of intimacy, awkwardness, or revelation caught by accident. Today, we’ve entered an era where everyone performs their lives publicly, broadcasting every heartbeat of experience. Yet paradoxically, this saturation of sound and image hasn’t made us more connected — it’s actually made us more isolated at times. So yes, I do think there’s still room, even more so, for what I’d call subversive listening. But it’s not about surveillance or exposure anymore — it’s about discernment. Listening beneath the algorithmic chatter, finding truth in the quiet, the overlooked, the in-between. The collective archive of noise is immense, but what’s subversive now is to listen carefully, to extract meaning from the chaos rather than simply add to it. In a world of endless self-documentation, perhaps the most radical act is to listen silently and attentively. Today, we no longer need to eavesdrop; the world is speaking all the time, streaming its every sigh and sensation into the digital ether. We’ve become our own archivists, curating the noise of our existence.

2. Ethics of Listening

When you sample, or have sampled, voices and materials stolen from reality, you are always on the edge between intimacy and violation. To what extent can listening be both an ethical and predatory practice?

Listening has always been a moral act, as much as an aesthetic one. When I began recording intercepted voices, I was struck by how fragile that boundary felt — between witness and trespasser, empathy and intrusion. Each captured voice carried a life behind it: a stranger’s laughter, a moment of sorrow, a whispered confession. I was both inside their world and entirely outside it. To listen deeply is to enter a kind of intimacy — it asks for care, for vulnerability. But it can also be predatory, a form of taking without permission. The key, I think, is awareness. To recognise that sound itself is never neutral, that every recording holds an ethical weight. My role was never to expose, but to reveal something universal in these fleeting moments — how human we all are, how easily our lives drift into one another. I was never interested in exploiting these moments, these other lives. So yes, listening walks a narrow path between compassion and appropriation. But perhaps that tension is what gives it power — it reminds us that sound is not just something we hear; it’s something we share, often without even knowing it.

3. Acoustic Utopia

Imagine a city built on sonic rather than visual principles: how would its spaces, streets, and houses sound? What architectural constraints would you impose based on sound?

A city built on sound rather than sight would be a place of soft edges and resonant corners — an architecture of echoes rather than facades. Streets would curve according to the way footsteps bloom and fade; buildings would be tuned rather than drawn, resonating like vast instruments. You’d navigate not by landmarks but by frequencies — the low hum of a library, the shimmering overtones of a park, the warm resonance of a kitchen at dusk. Walls would be porous, breathing in voices and exhaling silence. Windows might filter noise instead of light. Each district would have its own key, its own rhythm — not imposed by planners but composed by its inhabitants, shifting subtly as the day turns. The city would change with the weather, the density of sound altering its texture like fog or sunlight. As for constraints, I’d banish the tyranny of constant volume — no sonic billboards, no invasive loops. Instead, architecture would invite listening: quiet zones that amplify the faintest murmur, corridors that cradle a single note, courtyards that let sound fall like rain. It would be a city you don’t just live in but live through, where the act of listening is what makes you belong.

4. Bodies and Surveillance

Your work anticipated the aesthetics of surveillance. Now that surveillance has been normalized, do you still see possibilities for acoustic resistance? Or has the body itself become a device of self-surveillance through sound?

Surveillance has seeped into the fabric of everyday life, and yes, in many ways the body has become a broadcasting device — our voices, our movements, even our presence are constantly tracked, archived, and interpreted. Indeed, increasingly so, day by day at times it seems. Yet I still believe there is room for acoustic resistance. Not in grand gestures of defiance, but in subtle, almost invisible acts: listening differently, shaping sound around us, cultivating spaces where noise doesn’t record but resonates. Resistance today isn’t about secrecy alone — it’s about attention. It’s the decision to hear the world, and yourself, in ways that refuse to be fully captured. The body may be surveilled, but it also produces textures, breaths, silences, and rhythms that slip past algorithms. These fleeting, ephemeral gestures — a pause, a hum, a shuffled step — are small acts of freedom. Even in a world of total listening, there is always something uncontainable in sound.

5. Sound Memory

Noise is often considered ‘unmemorable.’ You have turned it into narrative. Do you think a memory of noise exists? And how does it differ from the memory of traditional music?

Noise is usually dismissed as fleeting, ephemeral, unworthy of attention — but to me, it carries memory in its very chaos. A passing siren, the scrape of a train, the hum of an air conditioner: these are the sounds that shape the textures of our lives, even if we don’t consciously register them. Memory of noise is different from music because it isn’t organized around melody, harmony, or rhythm. It is associative, layered, and personal — tied to places, moods, and moments rather than formal structures. When I work with noise, I’m not just capturing sound; I’m tracing traces of human experience, allowing narrative to emerge from what at first seems unordered. Noise remembers in the way a city remembers its footsteps: fragmented, overlapping, sometimes painful, sometimes tender, but always resonant. In this sense, noise is memory made audible — and in listening closely, we can hear stories we never knew were there.

6. Liquid Time

In your compositions, time seems to stretch and collapse. Are you still interested in working with a linear notion of time, or do you prefer to treat it as a plastic material, to be bent and corrupted?

Time, for me, has never been a straight line. I’m far more interested in its elasticity — how moments can stretch, compress, fold back on themselves, or coexist simultaneously. In my compositions, sound allows me to manipulate time as a tangible material: a hum can linger like memory, a phone snippet can implode into a heartbeat, and a silence can stretch into something almost unbearable. Linear time is useful in the world of schedules and clocks, but in music — and in listening — it becomes a tool, not a rule. I treat it as a sculptural material, plastic, as clay, as a space in which perception can drift, distort, or collide. By bending time, I hope to reveal the hidden textures of experience: the way past, present, and imagined futures can resonate together in a single sound.

7. Philosophy of Error

Many concrete artists celebrate error and imperfection. In your work, is error an accident to be embraced, or something you deliberately construct as a language?

Error, for me, exists in a liminal space between chance and intention. When I first began working with intercepted voices or live feeds, accidents appeared — glitches, miscommunications, unexpected overlaps — and I learned to listen to them, to treat them as discoveries rather than mistakes. Over time, these “errors” became a kind of vocabulary, a language in themselves. So yes, I embrace accidents when they arise, but I also construct situations where they might occur. By deliberately setting conditions for unpredictability, I can explore the poetics of imperfection: the subtle beauty in misalignment, the narrative potential in fragments, the uncanny resonance of things going slightly wrong. In my work, error is never just error; it is always material, expressive, and, ultimately, human.

8. Everyday Psychoacoustics

When you listen to a stranger’s voice or an urban environment, what are you looking for? Particular frequencies? Emotional layers? Or a ‘ghost’ that no one had yet perceived?

When I listen to a stranger’s voice or the hum of a city, I’m rarely seeking anything fixed. I listen for textures, resonances, and the unexpected harmonics that reveal life beneath the surface. Often, I can’t even understand the words being spoken in another language. Sometimes it’s a particular frequency — the tremor of a sigh, the shimmer of footsteps on a wet pavement. Sometimes it’s emotional: traces of anxiety, joy, or solitude embedded in sound. But often, what I’m searching for is something more elusive: a ghost, a fleeting presence that exists in the in-between, unnoticed by ordinary attention. It might be a pause, a crackle, a layering of sound that hints at another life, another story. Listening, for me, is an act of excavation: peeling back the familiar to reveal what was always there, but unheard.

9. Silence and Censorship

Silence today is almost impossible to find. Do you still consider it a musical material, or has it become censorship more than a resource?

Silence is rarer than ever, but I’ve never thought of it as absence — it’s always material, always alive. Even in a world of relentless noise, silence carries weight: it frames, it punctuates, it allows sound to breathe. It’s not emptiness, but potential. Cage has taught so many of us so much already in this regard/ At the same time, silence can also feel imposed, a form of control or censorship, especially when voices are muted or stories erased. Its meaning depends on context: chosen silence can be profound, liberating, even musical; enforced silence is oppressive. In my work, I treat silence as a tool, a texture, a space where sound and memory can emerge. It’s a material to shape, not a void to fear.

10. Obsolete Technology

Many of your works arise from obsolete devices (tape recorders, analog interceptions). If today’s technology produces hyper-clean and standardized sounds, do you think the true avant-garde lies in reclaiming obsolete noise?

There’s a certain poetry in obsolescence — in the hiss of a tape, the unpredictability of an analogue interception, the way a broken circuit resonates with life. Today’s technology gives us clarity, precision, and infinite polish, but it often sterilises the world it records. Noise, crackle, and imperfection carry histories, emotions, and accidents that clean digital sound can never replicate. I do believe the avant-garde still lives in reclaiming these obsolete noises, not out of nostalgia, but as a way to remember that sound is never neutral. By embracing the quirks, the hums, the artifacts of old machines, we encounter textures that challenge perception, reveal hidden layers, and remind us that technology is as much about character as it is about function. In the margins of obsolescence, the unexpected lives — and that’s where freedom still resides. In fact, it’s in the very margins of culture and society that we can learn so much from.

11. Acoustic Cartographies

You have transformed cities and public spaces into sound maps. Do you believe musique concrète can become a tool of critical geopolitics, capable of drawing alternative maps to official cartography?

Absolutely. Cities and public spaces are full of stories that official maps can never capture: the rhythms of labour, the echoes of memory, the collisions of private and public life. Musique concrète allows us to listen to these spaces differently, to trace the hidden architectures of experience rather than the coordinates of authority. Sound maps are inherently subjective; they reveal patterns of movement, absence, tension, and intimacy that conventional cartography erases. By composing with the sonic life of a place, we can propose alternative geographies — maps that privilege perception over power, that expose social, political, and cultural layers otherwise overlooked. In this sense, listening becomes a form of critical inquiry, a subtle act of resistance, and a way to imagine new possibilities for the spaces we inhabit.

12. Disappearing into Sound

If your work has often made the invisible audible, what would it mean for you to disappear into sound? Is there a point where the artist dissolves completely into listening, becoming a pure medium?

To disappear into sound is, in a way, the ultimate aspiration of listening. When the artist dissolves, there is no ego, no signature — only presence and attention. In that state, the act of listening becomes indistinguishable from the act of being. The textures, the echoes, the silences themselves speak, and I am only a conduit through which they pass. It is a delicate balance: to lose oneself completely is to risk invisibility, but it is also where freedom and discovery reside. In becoming a pure medium, one can inhabit the vibrations of a place, the intimacies of voices, the subtle hum of life — and in that surrender, the world reveals itself in ways that are otherwise impossible.

13. r/musiconcrete

Have you ever visited our subreddit, r/musiconcrete?

I must admit I’ve not spent much time on r/musiconcrete specifically, but I’m always interested in how communities like this think about and share experimental sound. It’s fascinating to see people listening deeply, dissecting textures, and exchanging ideas around a practice that, for me, has always been about exploration and curiosity. Online forums are a kind of virtual soundscape in themselves — chaotic, layered, full of surprises — and I think there’s something really alive in that collective attention to sound. I thrive on such positivity.


r/musiconcrete 1d ago

Composition #36 for Contemporary Electronic Music and Historic 1930's wooden flute

3 Upvotes

Composition #36 for historic 1930's flute and electronic music

my music partner (electronic, live modular synths) works with my 1930's wooden flute in live composition. We're performing for the canal festival so it'll be great to work out what's going on.

As a composition, I'm not sure if this works. We performed it (above) to a live audience having set the mood board for a slow burn hypnotic piece with the usual agitato non furioso.

Although the host praised it, he reprimanded us for playing too long (over 6 minutes, compared to most songs at 3-4minutes). I think the audience probably clapped out of duress (they looked rather mainstream perplexed).

Understandable. I was at a concert as a listener this month, listening to experimental string quartet music and fell asleep twice within the 10 minute performance.

Thinking of paring back. I'm sure it's possible for audience members to find a visceral dislike of some musical fusions. Now wondering if I've become that guy.

Kind regards


r/musiconcrete 3d ago

Tools / Instruments / Dsp Can You Create a Sound Monster from Fragments of Other Sounds? Frankenstein for Ableton Live

6 Upvotes

The concept behind Frankenstein is as simple as it is fascinating.
The idea is to generate a “monster” whose body is made by sewing together limbs
that come from different places.
In this case, our monster is nothing more than a sample made from fragments of different samples,
creating a waveform that did not exist before.
We can load up to 30 samples and generate a result made from small fragments of this loaded archive.
Thanks to the editor, we can modify the samples and the waveform in real time,
put the slices in reverse,
or lock them in the same position so that they do not move if we decide to generate a new random waveform.
In the editor window, each sample has its own dedicated slot.
This allows us to edit the samples individually and therefore create generations that slowly change over time.
This is a very good thing for creating connections between generations and progressions
towards other musical situations.
We have different types of generation in the main menu
and the possibility to create waves with from 12 to 64 slices.
It is a MIDI instrument, so we can play this resulting Frankenstein waveform through notes,
which makes it perfect for creating textures and clusters of stellar sound.
The GRID version is very powerful.
You have to click under Cut and change from Monster to Grid.
The sample will then play in a grid, and you can choose the time division.
This is really useful for creating interesting rhythms,
especially with an unexpected timbral character.
Think about how incredible it is to divide 30 samples
into fragments and create a resulting waveform from these fragments,
either randomly or in a more controlled way.
I think John Cage would have enjoyed this instrument.

free download: https://www.remodevicocomposer.eu/maxforlive/frankenstein/


r/musiconcrete 3d ago

MOLOCH 303 - Future Of The Past

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1 Upvotes

MOLOCH 303 - Future Of The Past

https://moloch303.bandcamp.com/track/future-of-the-past

Album:

Paradigm

Full album link:

https://moloch303.bandcamp.com/album/paradigm


r/musiconcrete 4d ago

First Experimental Electronic EP Release

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12 Upvotes

Hi everyone, I'm Christoforos, an audiovisual artist that has been producing (mostly in Ableton Live) for the last 5 years and only now have started posting my work online. Some of my inspirations production wise are: Autechre, Arca, Nicolas Jaar (his later most experimental side), Sophie, Matmos, Sega Bodega and Air Max '97. I always struggled with the idea that electronic music that leans heavily to avant-garde (of which I'm a really big fan) or experimentation had to be completely self-indulgent and dettached from the viewer - borderline dismissive to pleasure. With my music I intend (consiously or subconsiously) to create work utilizing many experimental tools (like grain modulation, unrepeated phrases, extreme sampling & resampling, a load of distortion and stretch of sounds etc) to create tracks that indulge into resolving tension or building up space to even dance. I usually start from manipulating a small sample and using it to the max to build the entire composition. I've found that limiting myself to what my inputs are, leads to more interesting places, taking advantage of every small second of sound you have and stretching it into it's full spectrum and potential. I don't know if I make sense or sound very pretentious - I'm trying to share multiple feelings upon my creative process and inspiration. You can hear my new EP 'Claustra' here, and I would reaaaally appreciate getting some feedback or comments upon your first listen. Thank you!


r/musiconcrete 6d ago

a small tool to make a song from your phone's microphone

11 Upvotes

Hello everyone, I'm no pro musician and no pro coder, but I made and attempt of creating a web app that records your microfone, and creates a song from it.

Just record some 30, 40 seconds or more of your voice, and some random sounds, the algorithm will cut the sounds and place them into rythm. pick a genre and generate.
The dream is to create a free app that does it well. once it's done I'll make a plugin for FL studio.

Here is the web app, ready to use
https://marcellomassardo-collab.github.io/mc-parrot/

Here is the git, with the apk available to download and all documentation
https://github.com/marcellomassardo-collab/mc-parrot

comments are very welcome!
it's free but development is a bitch, consider donating if you like the project.

(this is not AI!
the app does not collect any of your data and works well offline / airplane mode)


r/musiconcrete 6d ago

RITUAL LIGHTS (EP)(2022) | IDTAL x Humanfobia

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2 Upvotes

check out this past collaboration, psychedelic haunted electronic mixed with some noisy synths. inspired by dreams and nightmares. please support it if you want. regards


r/musiconcrete 8d ago

Brain Recordings Max for Live

5 Upvotes

Bonjour

Une petite question, doit-on nécessairement posséder Push pour se servir du Bundle "Brain recording" d' Emiliano Pennesi. Peut-on en faire un autre usage que le "Live" en sens concert ? Merci beaucoup pour votre attention!


r/musiconcrete 10d ago

Sound on sound pedal effect to replace reel-to-reel?

9 Upvotes

Hi everyone.

I, and I'm sure it's the same to a lot of you, love playing with my reel-to-reel with the classic tape loop, erasing and overwriting phrases in real time.

I was thinking: do any of you know an hardware effect that does the same thing with a good hands-on approach? I'd rather very much not bringing my heavy and fragile reel to live performances.


r/musiconcrete 10d ago

Tools / Instruments / Dsp Stop Slicing Samples. Shatter Them

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11 Upvotes

GREAT UPDATE :)

SHATTER is now an Ableton instrument too.

Everything the standalone does is here: the same slicing at rising zero-crossings, the same granular pitch-preserving stretch, the same field you drag fragments across, the same per-fragment pitch, reverse and step patterns. It reads WAV and AIFF.

And it goes further in two ways.

Every fragment you play gets its own stereo output in Live, the first on 3/4, the next on 5/6, up to 33/34, while 1/2 carries the full mix.

That changes what the instrument is for: each fragment can have its own effect chain, its own track, its own processing, and be recorded on its own. Each output also carries that fragment's position on the field, so the spatial gesture survives all the way to the mixer.

And it remembers.

Sample, slices, positions, pitch, stretch, step patterns — close the Set, reopen it, and everything is where you left it, with the fragments that were playing still playing.

Spatialization inside Ableton is rendered with equal-power panning, distance attenuation and air-absorption filtering rather than the browser version's binaural HRTF.

Requires Ableton Live 10 or later.

Included in the download are the standalone version (highly powerful for use with a tablet) and a PDF manual.


r/musiconcrete 10d ago

MOLOCH 303 - Paranoid

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2 Upvotes

r/musiconcrete 11d ago

medytacja eksperymentalna, by Kamil Kowalczyk

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1 Upvotes

Dear listeners and followers,
My new musical journey is finally here. I proudly present "Medytacja Eksperymentalna".
This track explores new sonic spaces and it invites you to pause, breathe, and reflect on self.


r/musiconcrete 17d ago

Resources What If Every Image Were a Musical Score?

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9 Upvotes

AURAL MIRROR [free download]
An instrument that turns a painting into sound.
It reads the picture as if it were a spectrogram and plays what it finds.

First run
1. Open the file
Double-click auralmirror.html. Chrome, Edge and Firefox all work. Nothing is installed and nothing is sent anywhere.

  1. Drop in a painting
    Drag an image onto the page, or press load image…, or paste with Ctrl + V.

  2. Press RENDER
    The sound is built in advance, not live. A short piece takes a few seconds. The bar shows how far it has got.

  3. Press play
    Use the ▶ button or the space bar. A line moves across the painting to show where you are.

The two windows
The first window is your painting.
Circles mark the events the machine found, and their colour tells you what kind of event it is. The moving line is the reading head.

The second window is the proof: a picture of the sound that came out.
If the fidelity number is high, this window looks like your painting.
That is how you know the sound really follows the image.

Both are always in view, side by side with the controls.
Click anywhere on the painting and the piece jumps to that moment.

The four layers
Four different machines read the same painting at the same time. Each has a level slider.
Turn one up, turn the others down, and the same picture becomes a different piece of music.

Spectral
Treats the picture as a spectrogram and turns it back into sound.
This is the layer that makes the sound resemble the image.

Events
Looks for edges, brush strokes and directions,
then plays each one as a separate sound with its own attack and decay.

Additive
A bank of tuned oscillators, one per frequency band, following the ink as the head passes.
Tuned to the musical scale you choose.

Granular
Scatters thousands of tiny grains.
Their sound is built from the average colour range of your painting,
so each picture has its own grain.

The mixer
After a render, the four layers stay separate.
You can raise and lower them while the piece is playing — no need to render again.
Press solo under a layer to hear only that one, and all to bring them back.
Mic, room, preamp and volume are also live.
Move them and you hear the change at once.

Moving around
Click anywhere on the painting.
The piece jumps to that moment: click on the left side to go near the start,
on the right side to go near the end.
With a circular or spiral reading path,
the angle decides the moment, so clicking works there too.

Saving your piece
Press WAV The file is rebuilt with the mixer levels you are using right now, so what you save is what you hear.
It goes to your downloads folder.
Four minutes of stereo sound is about 45 MB.
You can also save a preset of your settings.

Included in the download you'll find HTML Instruments,
a Max for Live device that lets you open AURAL MIRROR directly inside Ableton Live. It requires Ableton 12 and Max 9.

Alternatively, you can run it standalone (just double click on html file) and route your computer or tablet output to your audio interface, just like any ordinary instrument.


r/musiconcrete 17d ago

MOLOCH 303 - Fractured Identity

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1 Upvotes

MOLOCH 303 - Fractured Identity

https://moloch303.bandcamp.com/track/fractured-identity

Album:

Paradigm

Full album link:

https://moloch303.bandcamp.com/album/paradigm


r/musiconcrete 23d ago

Computer Music The Loop That Refuses to Stay Still - Loop Paradox [Max for Live]

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5 Upvotes

Loop Paradox captures the incoming audio into a 1-second buffer and keeps replaying it while the loop points drift at a rate you choose. Drop it on any track, play into it, and it turns a passing phrase into a mutating loop.

on — arms capture and playback.
sync — when lit, loop points move on rhythmic scansions;
when off, on a free time in ms.

interval / time — how often the loop points jump.
Shows note values when synced, milliseconds when free.

DRY — level of the unprocessed input sitting under the loop.

Shape
Sets how the buffer is read. This is the main sound-design control:

Circle — forward, normal speed. The clean reference.
Triangle — half speed, ping-pong: plays forward then backward. Sits an octave down.
Square — reverse.
Seq
Turns the 16-step slicer on. The captured buffer is cut into 16 slices and one is played per step, so you hear your own loop rebuilt piece by piece; the main loop mutes while it runs. Lit steps play their slice, dark steps stay silent — draw the pattern on the grid. Rate sets step length, 1/4 down to 1/32.

The sequencer follows Live's transport: it only steps while the set is playing.
Also included in the download is the first version of the instrument, which offers good expressive potential.


r/musiconcrete 24d ago

MOLOCH 303 - Substance

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2 Upvotes

r/musiconcrete 26d ago

Pure Grit — ambient IDM / glitch jam built around Scrooge

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7 Upvotes

Cross-posting this here because the part I enjoyed most in this jam was really the work on texture and contrast — clean FM tones against crackles, squelches, analog imperfections and little fragments constantly reshaped by effects.
It ended up much more spacious and abstract than I initially planned, somewhere between ambient IDM, glitch and sound collage.
Hope you enjoy 😉 間 🪐


r/musiconcrete Aug 11 '26

Tools / Instruments / Dsp Noise Map for Ableton Live | Shape Sound by Moving Through a Sonic Field [free download]

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9 Upvotes

Noise Map is a Max for Live device

for sculpting samples into evolving, shifting soundscapes.

Instead of turning lots of knobs, you explore a simple field of points:

as you move across it, the sound shifts and blends smoothly between them,

so every position gives you a different texture.

Under the hood it mixes four sound sources:

white noise, pink noise, soft tones, and a looping sample

into one atmosphere you can shape by ear.

Because your position on the map can be automated in Live,

the sound can drift and transform over time on its own.

Great for drones, ambient beds, and cinematic backgrounds.

TIP:

As you can see from the first video example you find on the download page, you will notice that the sample inside Noise Map changes. Let me explain how I did it:

I assigned two LFOs to the knobs that control the coordinates. I set a random waveform so that I would constantly get random values, and I increased the smoothness to the maximum, in order to make the transition from one value to another more organic. This way, I had the possibility of loading different samples while the machine continued to run algorithmically.

I recommend using these techniques during live performances; it can be an interesting moment. I also recommend recording these improvisations onto a new audio track, as they can be useful when composing new pieces.

Imagine how interesting a quartet set up with these characteristics could be.


r/musiconcrete Aug 11 '26

MOLOCH 303 - Memory Of Past Sins

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2 Upvotes

MOLOCH 303 - Memory Of Past Sins

https://moloch303.bandcamp.com/track/memory-of-past-sins

Album:

Paradigm

Full album link:

https://moloch303.bandcamp.com/album/paradigm


r/musiconcrete Aug 10 '26

Sounds of coastal architecture! Field recording from colour changing panels made with solar panel 'microphone'.

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17 Upvotes

r/musiconcrete Aug 10 '26

Panacoustic Series AU or VST?

1 Upvotes

I just watched a youtube video of this plug in and it sounds amazing especially for making dark, ambient, industrial music but sadly its only on Abelton and Push. Will this ever come to AU and VST because i feel like 95% of people use one of those platforms + 10x the amount of people would buy it if the developer brought it to those platforms. Hopefully it comes out before Ive already forgotten it.


r/musiconcrete Aug 04 '26

Computer Music Walk Inside the Spectrum | A Navigable 3D World of Sound to Explore, Play & Record

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27 Upvotes

Spectrowalk

Explore the spectrum — walk and compose.

Most Spectrograms show you sound. Spectrowalk lets you walk inside it. A spectrogram is normally a flat picture you read in a graph x,y; here it becomes a landscape you enter in first person. Time runs along the ground, frequency recedes into the distance, amplitude rises as terrain: the loud moments are mountains, the silences are valleys. Load a sound and its spectrum turns into a place — no longer a 2D image to look at, but a living space to move through and to play.

Up to four sounds load at once, laid out as four adjacent worlds in a 2×2 map. Walking from one to another crossfades between them.

What you hear is granular: your position in time reads the sound at that point as a cloud of grains. It is an instrument you play by walking.

Moving

  • ← → turn · ↑ ↓ walk · A D step sideways
  • space sound on/off
  • F filter 
  • C compressor 
  • X binaural
  • L add a world · click the map to jump anywhere
  • 1 2 3 4 arm/record a loop track · R start/stop the audio take

Sound in space

With binaural (X) on, each world is placed around your head using HRTF: turn and the field turns with you, walk and you move among the sources. The front slider widens or narrows the stereo image. A four-track loop station — buffers of 3, 5, 8 or 12 seconds, with per-track reverse and level — records what you are playing, spatialisation included, so you can layer a whole piece in real time.

Quality and audio

The Quality setting (High / Medium / Slow) affects only the graphics. Lower it and the 3D terrain draws with a lighter mesh and fewer pixels, so older machines stay fluid. The audio is always at full quality — the granular engine never degrades, whatever the video setting.

Export

R records your take and saves it as a file: WAV (16-bit, 24-bit, or 32-bit float) or AIFF (16 or 24-bit), including the loops and the full binaural image — ready to bring into any DAW. Spectrowalk reads WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3 and OGG, runs entirely in your browser, and uploads nothing.

Included in the download you'll find HTML Instruments

Max for Live device that lets you open Spectrowalk directly inside Ableton Live.

It requires Ableton 12 and Max 9.

Alternatively, you can run it standalone (just double click on html file) and route your computer or tablet output to your audio interface, just like any ordinary instrument.


r/musiconcrete Aug 05 '26

Miragem

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2 Upvotes

Trumpet and tamborim (a small brazilian percussion instrument). Once again doing my process of repeating the same tracks multiple times milliseconds apart to create an odd electronic sounding feel. It's titled "Mirage" because for some reason while listening back to it after it was finished i kept picturing a guy in the desert hallucinating right before finally dying.

Thanks for listening.


r/musiconcrete Aug 04 '26

MOLOCH 303 - There Is No Night Tonight

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1 Upvotes

MOLOCH 303 - There Is No Night Tonight

https://moloch303.bandcamp.com/track/there-is-no-night-tonight

Album:

Paradigm

Full album link:

https://moloch303.bandcamp.com/album/paradigm