Music plays a substantial part of my everyday life. From activity to inactivity, it’s like second to the air that I breathe.

Apparently, there’s a thing called “second album syndrome” or the sophomore slump. But this isn’t anything about the literal first-released album of a musician but the first album of that musician you’ve heard of and all the songs in the collection kicked ass.

I noticed this after numerous times I have liked an artist/musician mostly for that one album – the first album that let me discover them. It may have stemmed out from the repetitive playback of that record until it came to mind to try to discover other albums of the same artist but seldom have I liked two in a row.

One (or two) album wonders

• Athlete – Tourist
• Bon Jovi – These Days
• Bon Jovi – Lost Highway
• Corinne Bailey Rae – Corine Bailey Rae
• Diana Krall – The Look of Love
• Jack Johnson – In Between Dreams
• Joanna Wang – Start from Here
• Kings of Convenience – Riot On An Empty Street
• KT Tunstall – Eye to the Telescope
• Oasis – (What’s the Story) Morning Glory?
• Oasis – Be Here Now
• Orange and Lemons – Love In The Land Of Rubber Shoes And Dirty Ice Cream
• Rachael Yamagata – Happenstance
• Starsailor – Love Is Here
• Starsailor – Silence Is Easy
• The Sundays – Static And Silence
• The Thrills – So Much for the City

I got FruityLoops 3 to manipulate and produce tracks, good ol’ Winamp 5 to play exported materials and convert files to uncompressed WAV. And now, Audacity to trim and stitch raw materials.

What is this project all about

It’s all about SoundThemes™ wherein sound effects is another layer of the user experience. But that’s not all – it wouldn’t be a theme if the collection of sounds is fragmented. This would be used in all kind of actions and hints in any game or app.

So for this prototype, I used our favorite urine-colored drink – Mountain Dew to collect all sorts of soda can sounds. Using iPhone 4’s Voice Memos app, I recorded all clinks and clanks of the can from full to empty to down the trash can.

Let me hear!

Girls and boys, I present to you the raw recording (but that might probably bore you):

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/156270932″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

So here’s a trimmed and stitched version:

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/156272077″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

And an electronic version using only the individual sounds of the can:

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/156278666″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Boy did I miss clicking tunes in FruityLoops. I remember the sleepless nights in 2003 just composing electronica. I revisited this app (software as we call it back then) to produce some sound effects for a mobile app.

It was sometime in the early 2000s that I’ve discovered this electronic machine and got hooked to it. It has come a long way now – at version 11. At that time, I was eager to purchase the latest version for Php 25,000 hoping I would become a musician.

Here’s a quick tune to grease up the clunky wheels:

[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/156234303″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]