Soundscapes on Odio are crafted by arranging and blending loops within a virtual soundstage, with the listener positioned at the center. This gives our composers a fairly flexible and timeless canvas.
Rutger Muller took our canvas and filled it with a unique blend of nature, urban and spiritual sounds. We asked him about his work and inspiration.
Hey Rutger, could you tell us a bit about your background?
Hi Roger! Thanks for having me. I’m an electroacoustic composer from the Netherlands. I started making music as a punk drummer and eventually pursued an MA in Music Technology at HKU University of Arts. My teachers there encouraged me to develop an artistic vision based on my passions for avant-garde classical music, electroacoustic improvisation and game audio.
Together with future-minded classical musicians, I created avant-garde techno album Protokols. Joining game jams deepened my interest in playful interaction and interdisciplinary design – leading to for example GlitchHiker, a game with a soundtrack that fell apart as it “went extinct”, and Thresholder, a floor-projected music installation that allowed groups of people to improvise with physics-based soundscapes. Currently, I’m researching emergent gameplay, a game design philosophy that aims to create environments in which players can break the rules of a game, without breaking the flow.
I continue to be inspired by the creative potential of semi-public spaces. For instance, Processive was a project by Rutger Muller Ensemble in which we created site-specific spatial arrangements of speakers, instrumentalists and audience members. This open space feeling influenced Myubio, a modular sound system that simulates nature’s micro and macro fluctuations. I’m developing this project with spatial designer Ricky van Broekhoven and creative engineer Nikolai Gillissen. Like my other projects, Myubio embraces emergence, allowing the system to find unique pathways through its sound database.
How do these interests relate to your work on Odio?
Odio and Myubio’s shared fascination with spatial sound brought us together in always vibrant Eindhoven. I like how Odio has really carved out its own perspective on spatial sound – bridging soundscapes with augmented reality through intuitive interaction.
Odio helps me answer the question why nature sounds the way it does – or how we can use biomimicry to transform natural influences into new methods of sound design. Odio offers a fantastic collection of albums that take us on that journey, with artworks that draw us in even further.
Odio’s “infinite loops” concept particularly caught my attention. The app allows loops of different lengths to overlap, creating evolving, organic soundscapes that mimic nature’s randomness. I also appreciate the customization options, as they let listeners shape the experience to their liking, promoting a creative interaction with the sounds. This aspect ties in nicely with the album’s wabi-sabi theme, the embrace of impermanence, imperfection, and incompleteness.
What are your thoughts on the new Composer Mode?
Composer Mode is so much fun! It allowed me to quickly experiment with different soundscape ideas and tweak specific samples.
Quick anecdote: when I listened to Wab-Sabi soundscapes in an actual forest, the combination of real and simulated nature felt pretty surreal. That said, I stayed focused on creating calming soundscapes for people to enjoy over long periods, wherever they happen to be.
The reverb options are great for adding atmospheric depth, and for changing the mood of certain sounds. This is how I came up with the composition Abandoned Baseball Court, which – I think – feels as urban as it feels natural.
Importing samples from Ableton Live was straightforward. The sound wall function (width control) is powerful, though it sometimes takes a careful ear to adjust it optimally. This isn’t Odio-specific, there is just an fine relationship between the binaural width of sounds and how much friction they convey.
I noticed that a drag-and-drop feature could be useful to order the list of sounds. I realized this as Wabi-Sabi offers a wide variety of sounds to mix, match and contrast. These are twenty lengthy samples of gongs, rain, water, crickets, frogs, wind, thunder, ice and dreamy effects. I would be curious about the idea of adding subtle, slow sound movements.
Tell us about your album, Wabi-Sabi?
I was immediately enthusiastic about creating an Odio album focused on natural sounds and realistic environments, but I knew I also wanted to add a sense of mysticism. Nature’s soft noises convey a meditative feeling, but they don’t necessarily put us into a trance. So by adding sparsely placed gongs to the soundscapes, I wanted to change how the listener perceives the natural sounds, even when the gongs are not sounding.
As for the natural sounds, I wanted to dive into some kind of essence, textures that universally appeal to us. I like working from (so called) simplicity as it gives our minds space to tap into the finest details of sounds – which are of course all susceptible to natural decay (wabi-sabi). This allowed me to create a palette of sounds that blend nicely together, in natural or surreal ways.
I set out to create layerings and contrasts: crunchy vs bubbly, crispy vs whooshy, ticking vs chirping, etc. (I’m really enjoying how we can describe timbres through language). Working with up-close sounds gave me the freedom to explore both ear-whispering effects and distant – almost subconscious – atmospheres.
For the low-frequency spectrum, I used more than just gongs. Distant thunder provides a subtle, drone-like quality, but I kept these rumbles sparse to avoid overshadowing the zen-like ‘emptiness’.
With the gongs, I wanted to create endless harmonies. Gongs contain rich harmonies and dissonances of their own, almost like miniature orchestras, due to the intricate feedback loops of vibrations within the metal. By layerings gongs of varied pitches and tonal colors, listeners can enter a calm space for the mind to explore. Especially when interspersed with shifting periods of silence.
Where does your inspiration come from?
As a composer, my favorite musical components are timbre, the sonic character of materials and shapes, and acoustics, the relationships between sounds and spaces. Both contain an elegant instability; natural sounds evolve in complex, unpredictable ways, like fractals or water wave patterns.
Equally so, I get inspired by music that stays close to nature, or music that explores the cosmic origins of emotions through abstractions and silences. For example Korean sanjo music (scattered melodies), Japanese noh theatre, the water drumming music of the Baka people, and Brian Eno’s generative album Reflections. And although new age music has a mixed reputation, I find gems in the genre, like The Bells of Sh’ang Sh’ung by Henry Wolff & Nancy Hennings.
Do you see this leading to other collaborations, also with your other audio projects?
Absolutely. I aim to stay open to collaborations because they’re invaluable technically, creatively, and socially. Spatial audio has vast potential and can be explored in so many ways, especially with interactive and game-like approaches. This experience has broadened my perspective, and I’m looking to bring some of these ideas into my electroacoustic performances, where I want to continue exploring methods beyond traditional PA systems and stage setups.
Do you have any advice for other artists interested in composing with Odio?
Sure – start by letting go of any preconceptions about music, even ambient or soundscape music. Spatial sound invites us to explore the natural or even cosmic roots of music.
Experiment with sounds you might initially find “ugly” and see if they have potential, use extended silences, layer unrelated rhythms, or try high-pitched glitches or deep bass rumbles. Sometimes, the most unusual combinations make sense when positioned in space. Also, using variations of similar sounds can create captivating swarm-like textures.
And, try to experiment with different ways of isolating sounds. Sometimes the background noises of a recording can add to the character, but sometimes they takes up too much energy, something I especially wanted to prevent in this Wabi-Sab.
Last but definitely not least, join the freesound.org community so we can explore (the meaning of) sound together.
You can find more about Rutger Muller through the following links:
