Ouorri - "A Mating Call for Silenced Beasts"

So?ing Machine

[Ouorri is a new primary identity for myself, but I don’t think it will outright replace “So?ing Machine” for all musical projects… just ones of certain natures. owu]

download the project file, and listen to the whole compo: https://warmplace.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?p=26711#p26711

lyrics and commentary:

(you good?)
(my paws hurt!)

come
and dance
beneath the stars
to my siren song

please
forget
how they shunned us
the points of their pitchforks

licking your wounds won’t dull those, sweetheart
so hey
we have space to share
here

we
to us
are not dangers
like to other beasts

clawed
embraces
no dilemmas
let me feel ’em deep~

oh!
we know we come to love
let’s show them how it works

~we know we come to love~
~let’s show them how it works~

we know we come to love
(I think we’re gettin’ it down!)
(hehe yeah?)

(have a nice rest)

~

this came together over a couple weeks! hard to measure that in actual hours spent working on it/actions taken, but. it was an effort. ~10 sessions, a couple ~all-day ones. ouo;

I can see it as unintentionally like the child of my entries “Some of our tracks can’t be covered” and “Loose Grip” from previous years’ compos, and, unlike them… ;u· it grew to what I’d consider a mature state before being submitted.

the lyrics aren’t terribly cryptic — the world can feel unforgiving, and the well-intentioned and the altogether innocent are sometimes dealt with using tools designed to be used against those who would never hope to be better. aim to find yourself surrounded by wisdom, patience, and loyalty to support you through your follies, and if you’re not so lucky, try not to let it erode your own for others. -u-

vocals/voices are all me. ·u· on the 2024 compo video, I commented that my throat simply Sucked™, but I’ve found time to turn it into a more viable instrument with practice! (and editing, and shotgunning takes)

as far as eligibility for inclusion in future SunVox versions goes, I was careful to keep the IN-ZIP file size (IIRC it’s been unclear to some entrants in the compos that the 256 KB limit means after standard zip compression!) low enough from the start! ^u^ everything but one clap sample, the vocals, and a layer of the chords underneath the main vocal section is a synth, thus small. I decided on using short, quickly-sung words and phrases I could record without dead air before writing any lyrics, found a decent compromise of workable vocal quality/intelligibility and compression with a few tests, and periodically checked the zip size to estimate how much I could get away with beyond the bare minimum. [vocals are mono, 22.05 kHz, recorded from source file at G#5 and played back at E4, in the lowest quality SunVox will save an ogg as. note that this method can actually result in a larger file size for short-enough wav samples, and retaining the original bit depth at the source doesn’t meaningfully affect the size of the ogg output!]

inclusion eligibility is always Priority #1 for me when producing for a SunVox compo, because I would hope to be able to provide valuable and lasting sources of inspiration to new SunVox users! nwn I was honestly pretty disappointed last year when 3 out of the 4 winners didn’t qualify… ´ouo` obviously Fair to make use of the 4 MB upper limit and good and impressive work musically, but c’mooon, y’all could take the opportunity to make Demos! it’s Cool to show how much life a few pattern effects can breathe into a synth, and provide nice-sounding instruments/effects that can be copied into others’ projects… and show what Tricks come in handy — like at 2:18, to lowpass multiple branches together, it seemed cleaner and simpler to route them into a single highpass and invert it (+ an inert compressor to align a couple phases) than to add and automate multiple lowpasses, or reroute them all through one lowpass and account for sidechaining.

in-app looks at my entries are up on my YouTube channel, but opening the files from the votepack within SunVox is obviously a better idea if you really want to inspect them! I left a few comments inside, and renamed a lot of modules such that you can see what they do at a glance. ouo