This episode presents a new composition featuring pieces I’ve been making with an app called Borderlands Granular that I’ve had on successive iPads for the past couple of years. It is by far one of the best experimental sound software tools I’ve used - which may be due to the authors’ acknowledgement of being inspired directly by the works and writings of John Cage, Brian Eno and computer music pioneer Max Mathews.
Borderlands originated as a class project at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics in 2011. Chris Carlson and Ge Wang co-authored a paper describing a desktop computer version of the software in 2012 and Carlson released the iPad version in 2013 with a significant upgrade in 2020.
The software allows for direct live recording ie sampling of sounds which can either be captured for storage and use in the system, or the iPad mics can be left open for live processing.
Multiple captured sounds can then be loaded and manipulated using sophisticated granular synthesis anda wide variety of parametric controls delivered via a neatly designed and highly intuitive interface. See borderlands-granular.com for more information or to purchase the app via the iOS app store.
For this episode, I worked over a few days recording samples of sounds made with objects in the apartment, then used these samples to generate a series of 5 to 10 minute borderlands outputs. A few of these are used in the composition interacting with field recordings I made in Japan in 2017.
The composition commences with a sonic catalogue of the sampled sounds, followed by the series of sketches combining borderlands outputs with the field recordings.
There are links to the borderlands website and you can find out more about the fortnightly sonic sketchbooks podcast at the episode guide at sonicsketchbooks.net
