Q:

Your thoughts on sorting through aleatoric recordings for sound design?

By "aleatoric" I mean recordings which are based largely on some kind of randomness.
I'd love to get a conversation going about approaching sound design from the perspective of curating (is that a good word for it?) little bits of audio from longer recordings which were created without some specific end goal in mind.  Although I spend plenty of time gathering chunks of sound to assemble into some specific final result, I also really enjoy just playing around with plugins and other noise-makers and recording the results regardless of what happens.
My favorite technique for this is loading up a tool like Aalto or Numerology and going to town on a complex patch, routing things around in a series of tiny experiments.  If I feel like actually banging on stuff, I'll just set my little Edirol to record while I throw things around the environment.  The whole point is to turn off the part of my brain that deals with intent and simply have fun in a "naive" way for a while.
Once I have the audio recorded, I archive it so that I can come back to it on a rainy day.  I've found tons of inspiration while rapidly sorting through hundreds of these recordings at a time.  I just load up all the files in Ableton Live and quickly scan through each one by dropping the play marker at different points.  If something strikes my fancy, I isolate that part of the waveform, put some basic fades on it, and load it into the sampler for more processing, pitch layering, etc.
For anyone else that enjoys this approach, what are your favorite techniques for efficiently sorting through the recordings and turning them into something useful in your music compositions/sound designs?

A:

Firstly, nice topic! I had to read a bit about the term to make sure I didn't come here talking out of my *ss first ;) I recall a partner and I used to do this a lot with Propellerheads Rebirth a while back, using various crazy mods people shared in the community. That was BIG for a while. We used to fill up MANY floppy disks with on-the-fly parameter switchings of 909, 808, 303 patterns being affected by the wonderful "pattern controlled filter" module. All of the switching was realtime w a mouse pointer (go figure) recorded into SoundForge and then sampled with an Akai S2000 sampler (and then sometimes RE-sampled while performing those back into the sampler while making wild movements with Akai's filter (mmm nice). I fondly recall how fun it was to collect all of that material, but in reality we maybe used 50 things out of over 800 samples or more...sigh..sad really. 
Secondly, I never really take the TIME to resample and store as often as I should in Ableton. It's a magnificent "Rebirth" to muck around with samples and sounds in a random fashion on it's own (and much easier than messing with an actual hw sampler, esp those older ones! ;P) I guess I have that creeping fear inside that tells me I may never REALLY come back to all that nice stuff and make use of it so it is not wasted. BUT i've been thinking hard lately while banging my head in trying to crank out some new decent material.. I need more random elements in what I do as well. I do music for the love of the mechanics of sound and decomposition thereof, so it only makes sense to get more into this 'aleatoric' frame of mind to devise the right components. I think I may combat my pessimistic side in this sampling/archive issue and take a nite session to just map a shitload of controls on the novation and padkontrol to a selection of vsts with crazy modulation features and record that shit. If anything, like you mentioned Nick, I can get some new inspirations from certain chunks. It's just taking the time to sit and noodle around...vs sound design (vst/ableton synth programming) or sweating over arranging tracks etc. One thing I've learned is that you have to sit down in this chair with PURPOSE and INTENT otherwise you wander off real easy in one direction or another. That's another topic... 
And yes ABSOLUTELY Aalto will be one of those twisted devices I will employ for the dirty task as well (and U-he's modular monster, Bazille). Excellent creative modular synth, Aalto. It's excellent because of both its limitations AND it's no-boundaries approach to authentic signal switching capabilities. I fell fast for it just as you did.. I wish I wasn't PC-based here so I could try this Numerology out. One day :) 
Yeah, I think I will employ Ableton's Sampler instrument as my new Akai S2000 and sling in a bit of the randomness from the first sitdown resample session. It is QUITE capable of artistic playback   

