Tag Archives: assignments

An Unwanted Time Machine: Anthem Part 2

I started off this project with the recording that I would loop. The most important part of ‘Anthem Part 2’ by Blink 182 is the first 8 seconds. Those first two cords get the listener pumped and ready for the rest of the song. It creates an anxiety and longer to hear the next verse. but what if it never came? What if you were stuck in this loop of the song forever? (Honestly, I would probably throw my computer at some part)

I played around with the timing of the song and the left-right speaker set up to throw off the listeners hearing even more, in order to create this sense of time shifting. Not only was there feedback, echo, and delay, but if you listen to it on stereo, the binaural timing of each ear is also completely different. I also played around with a frequency shift in order to pronounce the amount of echo there was. Parts of the MAX code are specifically timed, while others are easily adjusted and played with throughout the piece. Here is the sound of the result:

screen-shot-2016-09-18-at-8-43-18-pm

And here the link to the github:

https://gist.github.com/kqherself/7270b33c7ac37c075fddebba9170c666

Cheers!

Kayla Quinn

Sitting Stretched

For this assignment, I took the eponymous line of Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room” and repeatedly processed it using a few of Audacity’s built-in features.

Originally, I had intended to simply change the tempo of the recording and add echo with each iteration, but I found that doing so led to an extremely uncomfortable beating effect as the sampling rate became perceptible. I switched to using Paulstretch, which allows for extremely long stretching without losing (subjective) quality. I also added a low-pass filter at 5000 Hz to prevent the high frequencies in the “s” sound from dominating the recording.

On each iteration, using Audacity:
Paulstretch – Stretch Factor 1.15, Time Resolution 2s
Echo – Delay Time 0.35s, Delay Factor 0.15
Low-pass filter – Cutoff Frequency 5000 Hz,  Rolloff per octave 6 dB

The end result after twenty iterations (all included in the link) is a soundscape which is completely unrecognizable from the simple original message.