Mechanical Rhythm
I don't usually record sounds "in the field" but this seemed compelling. My house is warmed by hot air, and the 20-year old air handler serving the master suite has developed an interesting rattle with a Moon-like rhythm. It doesn't do it all the time, maybe once a day. Not sure why. Here is an MP3 of it.

My plan is to transform this to one or more proper percussion loops, either through nefarious audio techniques or conversion to MIDI. Stay tuned....

EDIT later the same day:

Here is an example! 4 repetitions of a 3-bar percussion loop at 120bpm (the original is a bit over 170bpm).


First, I filtered the hell out of the original recording, finding a frequency band that maximized the percussive dynamics. Then I applied an expander/gate process that subdued audio signals below a certain threshold. The combination of the two brought out the beats from the background noise. Then a softsynth white noise source was introduced. Then I brought out a side-chaining gate and a resonant filter. There were two paths from here. First, with the gate using the beats as a modulator and the white noise as a carrier, I created a white noise pattern equivalent to the beats. By varying the cutoff of the resonant filter with two different patterns, a "swooping" effect was created. Making one version the left channel and the other the right channel, the swooping became a motion in the L-R direction. Second, by putting the resonant filter first, the original beat and the white noise were added together. Applying the gate to that made the white noise trail the beat slightly. This became the center channel. Adding the two together, with some EQ to smooth out the wooden sound of the original beat, created the final product.