Psychic Reporter  [Music Album]
Channel: Ryukau
Date: 2023-01-06

Psychic Reporter is an album of my old electronic tracks. Almost all sounds are synthesized, and that makes up the cold and hollow texture throughout the album.

The name of album comes from a sampling used in D40, which says 「超能力を発揮してみたいと思います。」 ("Let me exercise my psychic power.") This sample was obtained from an old video where a news reporter is interviewing someone. The phrase was a humorous way to say "Let me guess what you are thinking about." I found it funny because the phrase felt so outdated, but kind of refreshing at the same time. I haven't heard the word 超能力 for a long time. The reporter was saying the phrase in casual manner with full of a smile in his face, and that was also contributed to the humor.

The selling point of this album is saturated high frequencies. I was focusing too much to saturate high, and it basically masked all the mid components. This resulted in a bit monotonous texture. Most of the sounds are short decaying one-shot samples made from FM synthesizer. Short decaying part was important because I was trying to make percussive tracks. FM is good at saturating high with aliasing. The name of tracks like D something are meant to be used for those tracks that have similar texture. However, the naming scheme is bad. It's hard to remember which number corresponds to which sound.

From engineering point of view, high is usually reduced to prevent true-peak clipping. I wouldn't like to reduce any high, so made a true-peak limiter using FFT resampling. Not sure if it also works on other environment, but at least it stopped clipping on my cheap speaker.

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Bandcamp:
https://ryukau.bandcamp.com/album/psychic-reporter

True-peak limiter source code:
https://github.com/ryukau/OfflineLimiter

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0:00:00 01-Printing car
0:00:16 02-D24
0:05:53 03-D40
0:10:41 04-D39
0:14:30 05-D30
0:18:34 06-Okla
0:23:55 07-D47
0:27:16 08-Tract
0:31:33 09-Machigai