Samplscenpickmosac

Editing practice

Find the useful edge of a recording

Every recording has a centre, the obvious event, and edges: the approach, the attack, the decay, the accidental noise around it. In collage the edges are often where the useful material lives. Editing is the practice of finding them, isolating them, and deciding how they meet.

Listening for the edge

Open one of your recordings and play it at normal speed with your eyes closed. Then look at the waveform and play it again, watching the cursor. You will begin to connect shapes with sensations: a sharp spike is a strike, a long plateau is a sustain, a ragged tail is reverberation. Pierre Schaeffer, who founded the studio that became the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in Paris, called this "reduced listening": hearing a sound for its shape and texture rather than its cause.

1Three slices from one sound

  1. Pick a recording of something dropped or struck.
  2. Cut out only the attack, the first 50 to 100 milliseconds. Listen.
  3. Cut out only the decay, everything after the attack. Listen.
  4. Cut out a 200-millisecond slice from the middle of the decay. You now have three sounds where you had one.

Schaeffer's famous "cut bell" experiment did something similar: remove the attack from a bell and it no longer sounds like a bell, more like a soft wind instrument. The source disappears; the texture remains.

Clean cuts: zero crossings and micro-fades

A click at an edit point happens when the waveform jumps suddenly from one value to another. Two tools prevent it. First, zoom in until you can see individual cycles and place your cut where the line crosses the centre, the zero crossing. Most editors can snap to these automatically. Second, add a short fade at each edge: 5 to 20 milliseconds is usually inaudible as a fade but removes the click.

Both examples above are synthesized in your browser. The first starts and stops instantly and you should hear small ticks; the second uses brief fades and sounds smooth.

Annotated edit diagramA drawn waveform with a cut-in at a zero crossing, a short fade-in, a kept rough middle section, and a fade-out before the cut-out point.CUT IN · zero crossingCUT OUT · zero crossing10 ms fade-in20 ms fade-outkept: the rough middle
Illustrative diagram drawn for this guide, not a recorded measurement.

Cutting against expectation

Once your cuts are clean, you can make them surprising. Interrupt a sentence before its last word. End a long drone exactly as a door slams. Leave a breath of silence where the listener expects a beat. Collage depends on the tension between what the ear predicts and what it receives.

Collage depends on the tension between what the ear predicts and what it receives.From this page

Reverse, pitch and stretch

Three transformations open up a single recording. Reverse turns a decaying sound into a swell that ends abruptly, a classic tape effect. Pitch shifting down an octave makes small objects feel enormous; a teaspoon on a glass can become a bell. Time stretching slows a sound without changing its pitch, revealing grain and detail. Use each sparingly at first, so you can still hear what the original gave you.

Loops that breathe

A loop is the simplest rhythmic device in collage. Cut a short fragment and repeat it. The challenge is avoiding mechanical stiffness. Try loops with lengths that are not tidy multiples of each other, let a loop drift slightly out of time with a second loop, or change one element every few repetitions. Steve Reich's It's Gonna Rain and Come Out (1966) are textbook examples of two identical loops slowly shifting apart, a process known as phasing.

2One phrase, four loops

  1. Take a single spoken word and loop it at its natural length.
  2. Duplicate the track and shorten the second loop by 30 milliseconds.
  3. Reverse a third copy and drop it to half volume.
  4. Mute and unmute these three across a minute, so the pattern never settles completely.

Editing checklist