Loop Playback
Starting from a sound or a fragment of a sound, looping makes it possible to join the end of a sound (or a selection) to its beginning in continuous playback with no glitches or breaks. Because it generates repetition, looping is a very powerful principle that can be used either as a simple repetition mechanism for sounds considered long (more than one second) or as a tool for generating continuous material from small fragments.
Original sound: Water-drop ambience, resonances
Exploration and loops with Freeze
For small fragments, two modes of use exist:
• Extracting small fragments of a sound with little internal variation, so that once the loop is created one cannot distinguish the loop’s beginning from its end. Continuous sounds are thus obtained. A similar process is used in so-called “granular” synthesis for fragments shorter than 30 milliseconds.
• Extracting small fragments with internal variations that give the loop a rhythmic sense—a procedure widely used in electronic and repetitive music.
Although the process is very rich, it tends to generate forms without variation that become tiring after a while. To soften this effect, one possible solution is to process the looped sound through a slight delay, creating small irregularities.
Looped playback can also be varied in speed and in playback direction.
The Closed Groove
Through a frequently told handling error (a groove closed on itself rather than engraved in a spiral), looping provoked Pierre Schaeffer’s astonishment in 1948 and gave him the key to reduced listening to a familiar sound in its pure sonic properties: by being endlessly repeated, the sound is no longer heard for its meaning (a voice fragment) but for the haunting musicality of its morphology.