Creative Abuse in Time Stretching
Justin Paterson · Journal of the Audio Engineering Society · 2011
An area of digital audio manipulation currently in flux is that of time stretching. Following the emergence of real-time granular synthesis as a compositional tool, early sampler-based implementations were pushed beyond ‘authenticity’ to create new timbres in the commercial music of the 1990s. As the algorithms improve, allowing more flexible and transparent implementation today, even more opportunities for a new ‘creative abuse’ exist. This brief will firstly contextualize through consideration of the metaphor of authenticity in the tape recording of the 1940s and its soon-parallel abuse, which offered new pathways into multi-tracking and Musique Concrete. The brief will chronologize, then continue by examining potential for exploitation of stretching artifacts in some contemporary algorithms, and discuss a quantification of this effect.