Ninety Nine 20-Second Songs for Human Body & Sampled Kitchen Items

artwork by Matt Lipps

LMM issue 2.6 is a collection of 99 audio tracks, each twenty seconds long, made of only sounds from my body (singing, clapping, etc.) and manipulated samples of objects I found in our kitchen (metal pots, knifes, cups, spray bottles, cumin seed, a small plastic cooler, tupperware, crystal wine glass, etc). These tracks are meant to be played together in random order (on shuffle). Many thanks to Matt Lipps for the fabulous cover art!

When I started thinking about this project, I was trying to consider what untapped benefits may be available from presenting songs in a digital format (and more specifically on a computer). I hear and read a lot of people talking about the degradation of sound quality caused by mp3 compression. I myself would much rather hear something on vinyl than from a computer. But surely, there are formatting possibilities offered by the computer– just like vinyl provided two separate yet conjoined canvases (an obvious example is Joe Jackson’s Night and Day)– that are only starting to be tapped. Many artists (like Brian Eno, 77 Million Paintings) are utilizing computerized randomness to create pieces that will sound different nearly every time they are played. Most of us already have the tools to do this with our own music library (using the iTunes “shuffle” function). To play songs from a single album in random order used to be relatively difficult, having to move the arm of the record player or fast forward or rewind the tape to the right spot. Even the shuffle option offered on most CD players is less than ideal, as it takes at least a moment for the laser mechanism to adjust it’s position for the next track.

In making Frequency Histograms for Predictor Variables, I’ve learned that iTunes also puts a small moment of space in between shuffled tracks, a fault which hopefully will be remedied in future versions of the program. With the right technology, this album should be shuffled with NO gap between tracks.

Where is all this going? As more artists realize their freedom from the restraints of linearity and duration (thanks to new technology), I think there will be many albums or even single songs (broken into smaller parts) intended for shuffle playback or for user reordering. Frequency has 99 tracks simply because that’s how many we can fit on an audio CD (and I did pick a specific track order for the CD edition). There are more Learning Music “shuffle” albums in the planning stages, including one comprised of 5400 tracks, something which will probably (by necessity) be released in only mp3 format.

Subscribers will find in our archives an even more exciting playback format for this album. The Frequency page (subscribers only) loads with songs randomized in our music player. You can shuffle them again by clicking on the “shuffle” button. This is where it gets better: Through some fortuitous flaw, if you click “shuffle” while the music is playing, that order will continue in the background, and you can play the new order on top of this. You can keep layering random playlists like this, until many are playing at the same time. Many thanks to Jesse at CASH Music for encoding this fabulous function. I highly recommend layering two or three instances of this album on top of itself. Listening to it now, I’m thinking that this is a better format for it than that which I originally intended.

For you non-subscribers– it only costs $.01 btw– here’s this month’s single, which is actually 9 of our favorite album tracks put together:

One last note: all the kitchen samples used on this record are available for free on our contribute page.

ENJOY! thanks for reading