Turning 90-year-old public domain banjo recordings into haunting ambient space music for fun and/or the torment of your enemies

Did you know that if you take 90-year-old public domain banjo music and then chop it up and slow it down 1000% and loop it over itself a bunch of times and add a bunch of distortion filters, it becomes melancholy ambient space music?

Or perhaps some sort of CIA advanced interrogation tool. ...I'm still figuring out this whole audio leveling thing.

Anyways, I made a whole album.

…If your speakers sound like they're about to combust, that's just them attempting lift off.

Or maybe they're actually about to combust. Like I said, I didn't adjust the levels of anything.

I've always been obsessed with venturing out of my narrative design foxhole and trying to dip my fingers at all the other elements of game development. I'm not a great artist, but I've drawn a character portrait or two. I'm not a great programmer, but I've created my share of clunky game prototypes.

The one thing which is always eluded me is MUSIC.

Because, you know, I'm an English major, and music is basically math. (I mean, so is coding, but practicing coding doesn't make your ears bleed and small animals hurl themselves out of third story windows. At least, not without some JavaScript plug-ins.)

One of the many things that I did do was direct and record audio for game trailers, which meant a lot of experimenting with free audio programs like Audacity*.

*Note: Some people dislike the amount of information that later versions of Audacity collect after the open source project was acquired by some big company. I wouldn't know, because I haven't updated my copy since 2012. Seeing as it's open source, I believe there are forked versions (Tenacity, Audacium, etc.) that are exactly the same thing minus said security concerns.

Anyhow, whilst working on trailer voiceovers, I got playing around with all of the various effects that Audacity had, and discovered the surprising number that turn your voice into a NIGHTMARE-RING-WRAITH-ROBOT-ON-HORSE-TRANQUILIZERS.

Sadly, that wasn't quite the tone that we were going for. I did, however, think, "I wonder what this would do to music?"

(Note to self: Begin development of Nightmare-Ring-Wraith-Robot-on-Horse-Tranquilizers Dating Sim.)

It turns out (with enough advanced interrogation techniques and/or looping), it can transform a 10 second snippet of 90-year-old banjo music into a five minute long soaring synth solar system. (Piano music also works pretty well.)

Anyways, if you're a fellow English major to whom music has always felt like some kind of black magic, I highly recommend taking up my new hobby.

Next up, I'm going to try bagpipe music.

Oh, there go the small animals again.

...I had no idea goldfish could jump that far.