Tobias Reber has released Kolapse, an album of remixes from his previous album Kola (iapetus, 2013). I remixed the track Piñata.
My approach was to try to keep the sounds mostly the same but change the timing. Tobias said the original track has the tempo 100 bpm, but it’s quite hard to hear this because each instrument – kick drum, pitched percussion and metallic sounds – has a different rhythm. I split each of the stems into fragments, sorted the fragments in various ways, then arranged them on a new tempo. For example, the kick drum stem was split into just over 1500 fragments, and sorted in order of information content as measured by the quantity bytes per second: b/s = file size of each fragment (bytes) divided by duration (seconds). You get different results depending on the file type. With uncompressed file types like WAV the b/s measure is proportional to duration, irrespective of the audio content, whereas with compressed files such as FLAC the b/s reflects the audio content. This technique was developed from my research into audio complexity, which explores how different information-based measures of complexity deal with different kinds of sound.
