What it is is an experiment I did a few months ago. I was watching Twilight again (shush!) and Edward was playing Clair de Lune for Bella and I started wondering what I could do with it to make a piece sound sort of like something familiar but not actually be that something. Does that make sense?
Luckily, my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) is Cakewalk By Bandlab, which used to be Sonar and will soon again be Sonar, comes with all sorts of ways to manipulate music. The CAL scripts (Cakewalk Application Language) themselves can be used to change music from Major to Minor or vice-versa, Randomize, Harmonize, Humanize, Transform, add Swing, and many other operations. With those, and the simple transposition or reversing and time manipulations you can find in any DAW, you can take a piece of music and make it your own.
The difficult part is keeping the same “feel” of the original piece but to not infringe on the original.
But they’re totally derivative, purposefully done, Déjà entendu as it were. The titles hint at the inspiration. Kind of blatant hints, but maybe just to me. And, yes, musically it's all over the place, so you'll have to listen to all of them to pick your favorite.
The only piece which may be totally unrecognizable is “Sister Madman” which sounds nothing like its inspiration…but I like the way it came out. That being said, “Still The Night” is my personal favorite. The embeds below all go to Bandcamp, but are also on YouTube, Spotify, etc. And the YouTube link is at the bottom of this page.
Clare The Loon
Dave’s Not Here
Just Imagine
A Little Naked Music
News In The Blight
Heroic Schizo
Sister Madman
Still The Night
The entire playlist is available on YouTube of course. (38) It Is - YouTube