title: Out of Style
instrumentation: electronic
duration: 3:51
written in: 2015
A stupidly formalist remix/rearrangement of a top-ten hit.
If you’re curious, here’s what I did: I cut up the song at the transients, which gave me 1,165 tiny samples. Then I arranged those samples from shortest to longest, creating a very gradual deceleration. Finally I applied a pitch shift, so that the piece begins a tritone below the original recording and gradually bends back up over the course of four minutes.
What fascinated me about this project was the fact that such technical and seemingly arbitrary procedures produced such a clear dramatic effect: it’s impossible to tell what song I used at the beginning, and completely obvious by the end, but where the moment of recognition happens is unpredictable.
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