I recently found a program called Meapsoft that's been all the rage with the kids these days, so I gave it a shot, and I gotta say it is awesome! Basically, it does the things it does in three main steps:
1. Cut the input soundfile into bite sized pieces (anywhere from 2 pieces to 50000) based on your instructions (either based upon beats per minute, which it detects automatically, or based on whenever it breaks a specific threshold and makes a noise).
2. Take the resulting lil pieces, and assign number(s) to them. What numbers, you say? Well, lots of different numbers! You get to choose, too! For example, I could choose to assign each lil piece we cut up in last step a number based on how loud it is. Or maybe I could base it in the overall pitch of the piece as a whole. Or maybe go even further, and assign each piece its entire frequency spectrum, assigning an array of numbers to each piece!
That is all well and good, but pieces with numbers are not very interesting... but now, we will see what those numbers are for!
3. Organize the pieces based upon the numbers we assigned in step 2! There is a large variety of ways to organize, just as there was a large variety of ways to numbers the pieces. For example, we could sort it in order of smallest to biggest, or from biggest to smallest, or we could scramble them by swamping them with other pieces with similar numbers; there are LOTS of possibilities, especially if you combine them with all the different ways you can number the pieces you are sorting!
It is really a very simple program, with great applications, and it is very fun to use. I recommend trying it yourself, and checking out the examples on their site.
Here are the results of me messing around for a while with a 5~ minute piece I played on a Yamaha keyboard, running through my distorted amp, running through a phaser and a few rack effects on my computer:
http://www.mediafire.com/?kk3jbp8vc8opi50
Enjoy!
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