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The first extended harmonic drone piece I created using a now defunct piece of software called SoundMagic, created by Alberto Ricci, with extra plug-ins created by Michael Norris, which are still available as AudioUnit plug-ins.
I wanted to start with a sound which was overall fairly constant (apart from gradually dieing away) but which contained a lot of variation within the sound. This has become a constant theme in most of my pieces – long, slowly decaying sounds, which contain a lot of movement within them. This seems to have two (probably more) effects on the listener which I particularly value – it slows down perceived time and creates a still, trance-like state, and at the same time it sharpens or sensitises the hearing – environmental sounds seem to become more distinct, turning the surrounding sound environment into sound art.
Technical bit: The sound source for this piece was the reverb from a single click played into a digital reverb set to around a 30 second decay time. The reverb tail was run through a granular time stretcher, then a bank of tuned resonant filters, then restretched. Both granular and spectral time stretching were used.And various other combinations of those processes. The resulting harmonic tones were then put together in Cubase.
