The English Market: Stainless Steel Gate

note: the terms for using the samples and music in this page (entirely royalty free) are laid out in this document.

Entering the English Market from Oliver Plunkett Street, I pass through this gate almost every day – and it yields beautiful sounds of surprising complexity which I find really impressive when I slow them down. Here are almost three minutes of beats, with gaps between them to facilitate cutting them apart and using them in a sample player (1.4 MB, in the iTunes / iPod MPEG 4 format, opens in a new window). I struck the gate and scraped accross the bars with and egg beater and a bamboo stick.

I then made up another short proof of concept, just a few musical gestures, using only the sounds of this gate (1:46, 1.7 MB, in the iPod / iTunes MPEG 4 format). To me, it sounds like I am almost ready to start composing music for the Cork City Gamelan – after I build a few software instruments first. For this demonstration, I just made a collage of audio files. Actual software instruments give me access to some nice MIDI features, such as velocity sensitivity, pitch bending, filter and volume envelope shaping, vibrato and tremolo, just about anything a good sampler can do.