K1TCHN: Using Sampled Sounds From My Kitchen To Make A Song

I have been learning about sound design and music production and am becoming more comfortable with working in Ableton. One thing I would like to do eventually is make music out of my circuit-bent objects.

As part of a sound design exercise, I made a track featuring bits and pieces of different sounds that I recorded while in my kitchen (e.g. hitting pots and pans, clinking cups together, clicking chopsticks, and opening/closing the fridge, and so on).

My result was a rather sinister and jungly tune:

I wanted my sound collecting process to be low-fuss so I recorded all of my sounds together in a single take using my phone’s Voice Memo app. No additional takes! Anything I recorded at that time was what I allowed myself to work with.

After importing my raw recording into Ableton I picked out clips that I liked the most and modified them in different ways.

For example, the clicking from 0:04-0:06 is my gas stove turning on, and the whooshing sound at 0:29 was originally from quickly swiping a metal pot lid with a metal soup ladle.

Many of the monkey/bird/barking -like sounds (0:09, 0:21-0:22, 1:09, 1:32) are parts and manipulations of a vocal sample of me yelling “Stop!” (there is a pitched-down clip around 1:06-1:07). It was from when my laundry timer set through Google Home went off during my take — since it happened in my kitchen, I figured it still counted. And, with some slicing and dicing, reversing, pitch and additional effect adjustments, we have 1:13-1:15 which (I think) sounds as if someone is asking, “who wants to watch?”

Some of the samples I used were heavily edited, others not so much. To me, the most obvious kitchen sounding effect I have in there is the one throughout that sounds like a knife chopping on a cutting board…because that is what it is.

What can you hear?

Here is an earlier version of the track, which I built upon: