~ human anatomy & experience ~

24.04.2024

beauty lies within the rough and amateurish. learn to appreciate kindness, nature, and the things other people care about. even if it's meaningless, we all need little dots of joy in our lives. we are all made to love, made to create.
that's human anatomy & experience.

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Download all (ZIP file, includes original AMR files, too!)

#	Title	Length	File Size	Link
1	venus	02:58	656 KB	Audio
2	girl who is treated unkindly by all those who know her	05:34	1.2 MB	Audio
3	i need to feel warm again	02:27	549 KB	Audio
4	hanging from the powerline	04:05	837 KB	Audio
5	please don't call it a pixie cut	02:56	736 KB	Audio
6	world wastes (a)way	04:13	894 KB	Audio
7	mirrors all around me	02:37	551 KB	Audio
8	get out of the ribcage!!	03:24	711 KB	Audio
9	angelic words	01:36	382 KB	Audio
9.5	rain child sleeping	01:19	1.8 MB	Audio
10	snow child weeping (secret track)	02:40	4.1 MB	Audio

Exclusive Trivia!!

"human anatomy & experience" began production around the time production on "mid-2020's super future panic-c-c!!!!!" began, so it's also been in the works for multiple months. It was ready to release a month or two ago, actually, but I felt that I needed to put some space between uploads.
The album's main inspiration was, funnily enough, Ocarina's EP "I Need Fragile Things Around", an experimental breakcore-ish EP with a gory, kinda visceral vibe, but it feels very satire, as though it was kinda made as a joke.
Honestly, I'm not the biggest fan of the music itself - I grew tired of breakcore a while ago - but I am a fan of the EP cover image, and the colours my brain perceives while listening to the music. I wanted to make a darker, more atmospheric album, one that felt just as dangerous and offputting (in a good way) as this EP!
So, the album cover for "human anatomy & experience" is comprised of a bunch of photos of power lines I took with my Nokia 2660 Flip, which tends to make the photos it takes look weird and blurry. My love for Serial Experiments Lain's visual style may have influenced the way this album cover looks, too. (Similarly to future panic-c-c! During, like, October of 2023, when I had begun working on both albums, I don't think I had rewatched Lain in a while, so I guess it's just an always-present inspiration for me. Weird.)
Just wanted it to look spooky and mysterious, in a similar way that the cover for "I Need Fragile Things Around" does. And I think I achieved that!
Oh, and what's up with the audio quality, you ask? Well, I was made aware of the existence of AMR files through using my Nokia phone to record audio. AMR is used primarily for voice recordings, and it's useful because you're still able to understand what's being said in an AMR file despite it being so compressed (becase little voice memos aren't meant to take up much space) but it's obviously not meant for music recordings, as you lose a lot of intricasies in songs when they're compressed that much. All of my music up until this point has been shared as full-quality MP3 files, however I had the idea that I could record a full album using my Nokia phone instead of exporting my songs directly to MP3 files.
I ended up not going with this idea though, instead opting to export my songs as MP3s, convert them to AMR files, and then convert them back to MP3s (because most devices these days cannot open and play AMR files). I think it's a good compromise, and ends up making the files WAY smaller in size, too. And you still get that lovely crunchiness!
But WHY, cyd? Why do you like audio compression enough to upload a full album made up of AMR files?
Well, I think that audio compression is just fun! The way that compression can make music sound is fascinating, and I love how different layers and instruments can merge together in such a crazy and chaotic way.
I'm also a Kidorikko fan, and I think it's super exciting to listen to songs from 40-year-old cassette tapes (that were no doubt recorded in a very sloppy way), or even those Real Audio files of their songs that Ryuichi Sato uploaded to his website in 1999. I think we're so obsessed with high-quality audio these days that we're repulsed by the way that compressed audio sounds, when I think it sounds really awesome!
Also, it's kinda nostalgic... Ew, I hate saying that, but it's true! I also love flash games and old YouTube videos, (both of which tend to have an abundance of compressed audio in them) and I think it's so exciting to hear music that's been bitcrushed to hell and back - I adore the opening song in Tempo for the 32X just because you can hear the pixels, lol!
So I guess "human anatomy & experience" is also a celebration of that. Screw professional audio quality! Screw WAVs and FLACs! Here is my album that I released in 2024, the files for the songs are almost all under 1MB in size. Have a fantastic day.
(Onto the songs!)
"venus" was originally created for a school project about planets and stuff! We were tasked with writing a song about whichever random planet in our Solar System we were given, and of course I got Venus. While I was sick when we were meant to present our songs (Meaning that I was never actually able to show mine off) I suspect most songs done by my classmates were heavily improvised and/or rap songs, so my song would have stuck out quite a bit, haha.
The song itself wasn't inspired by anything in particular, however I realised that it reminds me of the start of Vietnam by Crystal Castles, just a bit. (I'm not a Crystal Castles fan by any means, just heard the song in a 2kinoko playlist!) I'm honestly happy with this song, I think it's fun! I like the drums and all the different intrument sounds, the melodies are solid, and I think whispering the "lyrics" (Just facts about Venus lol) and just adding them in wherever, regardless of rhythm or anything, sounds pretty cool!
"girl who is treated unkindly by all those who know her" (yes, the name is meant to be than long) is another one of my favourites from this album, hence why it's put so close to the start! I wanted more for it to sound harsh, much more than it ended up sounding, but I like the contrast it has between the pretty glockenspiel and harp and the distorted drums and weird metallic sounds. I'm particularly proud of the sawtooth melody near the end, how it's so much louder than everything and how that prevents it from being messed up rhythmically by everything else going in in the song at that point! Also, it's such an energetic and joyful way to end off a song that's meant to be chaotic and hostile.
"i need to feel warm again" is pretty different to everything else in the album, reason being (if I recall correctly) it was a much older song that existed as a work in progress song for months, before I then finished it up. I'm not sure I have any way to verify this, though, so you'll just have to take my word for it, hehe! This song was originally meant to go in some sort of self-titled album (which will probably exist in the future, who knows!) and was meant to be called "A Funeral For Funeral Language".
Eh... Long story short, Funeral Language was the name of a band I was a part of for a very brief period in... 2022? I'm gonna say 2022. We never even began making music because none of us were good at singing or playing instruments, so it never got off the ground.
This song's solemn atmosphere was meant to be a way of looking back on something that never was. Didn't think it really fit, though, (I would much rather write a vocal song about Funeral Language than an intrumental) so I gave it a new name. Idk, definitely not my favourite in the album, but it's still cool!
"hanging from the powerline" does not, in fact, use any samples of rain sounds! It's all made using synth, and I think I did a good job at that!
The song's very much inspired by Serial Experiments Lain, both in the title and the way the song sounds. It's slow and calm and kinda scary, and invokes imagery of a dark, gloomy street, soaked with rain and lined with humming power lines. I'm super proud of how I managed to make the synth sound in this song, and it seems to have held up well through the compression compared to the other songs in the album.
"please don't call it a pixie cut" is based off a screen recording I did of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, where my character stood behind a synthesiser and interacted with it a few times. Instruments in the game seem to produce random notes when interacted with, and the main melody of "please don't call it a pixie cut" was created using this method. (While I've long since deleted the video of my character in ACNH playing this song, which makes me sad, here is a crappy MIDI I converted the audio from the video into, before working on this song!)
The song title comes from a kinda pet-peeve among transmasc and AFAB non-binary folks who want to get their hair cut short, but hairdressers, bound by gender norms, seem to always refer to short hairstyles on AFAB people as "pixie cuts", a very traditionally feminine name. This is very annoying! Don't do this!
The song itself is probably the most cheerful on the album, though. Once again, I'm proud of the sounds I was able to accomplish with this song, and the main melody is very solid considering it was completely random. I also think this song sounds good even when compressed to hell and back!
"world wastes (a)way" was originally made for Static Mosaic, however I thought its darker, empty nature helped it slot into human anatomy & experience very well! And let's face it, I've made plenty of songs for Static Mosaic already, I can spare a few.
This song probably fared the worst out of the bunch when compressed, AMR files seem to like bass and drums the most and high-frequency sounds the least, as a whole lot of intruments in this song are near-silent. (Though that could just be because panning makes them very quiet, too; AMR files do not support stereo audio!) Yeah, it's pretty repetitive, but it's a fun song.
"mirrors all around me" was honestly intended to be long and drawn-out, letting the listener focus on how intruments sound instead of the melodies they play. As such, it's my least favourite song on the album by a long shot.
I still think it's cool, and I'm proud of the way it progresses, but I kinda knew back when I was first exporting it that it was, similarly to "Lacework! Clockwork! BERSERK!!", something more to pad out the runtime of the album. Nah, I'm being mean.
"get out of the ribcage!!" is a fun song, I like the way I layered stuff and the way it kinda hums. It's urgent and spooky, and since there are so many layers, the compression blurs together a lot of stuff, so you're never quite sure what you're hearing. It's neat!
The title kinda speaks for itself, honestly. My weird synesthesia brain sees this song as a deep red, with some grey and black bits, which is perfect for what I was going for.
"angelic words" was probably meant for a different album or something, but I also thought it could be fun as part of human anatomy & experience. While it's short, I think it's super nice, and the drums are nice (even if they're very loud compared to everything else!)
"rain child sleeping" is the coverup for the secret 10th track, so it's placed at #9.5, I guess! It's just a looping recording of rain sounds, which is also used in a game of mine. (Which isn't public yet, but I'm workin on it!) It lasts for almost exactly 4 minutes, though in hindsight I probably should have made it longer... Eh, I think 4 minutes of rain is enough to keep all but the curious away.
The title is obviously a play on the title of the secret song, which is "snow child weeping".
Said song is my second ever original vocal song that's been uploaded to the internet, the first being "Not From Our Planet"! Technically, though, "snow child weeping" was the first to be completed out of the two.
The song's about a lot of things, most of which are very personal to me. I'll let you figure out what all those things are, though; most of the stuff is pretty on-the-nose. The song is meant to be super contrasting to the rest of the songs in the album, seeing as how everything in it, aside from the vocals, are much less compressed. My idea to convert the vocals to an AMR file and back came seemingly out of nowhere, but ever since I've been bitcrushing and distorting my vocals in all sorts of different songs, so it was definitely a good idea!
The specific take of my vocals, however... Okay, it's not great. But I had recorded a ridiculous amount of takes before that, singing in multiple different styles and pitches, and none of them really felt right! This one doesn't either, and you can tell I wasn't really used to singing in such a low voice because I go out of key quite a few times (Most notably at the start... Ew.) but at that point I was DONE with this song and just wanted it it to be over.
Even still, I'm proud of this song! I think the intrumental itself is fun, and the sound I was able to achieve in the little section between verses is actually pretty impressive, if I do say so myself!

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