Luigi – Experimental Sound Synthesis

Phasors and Organs

Mon, 17 Apr 2017 05:47:25 +0000

This piece makes use of a couple of things we talked about in class, namely a dedicated sub bass as heard in the breakdown and intro parts and heavy use of phasors to achieve the movement in the sporadic synth heard at the beginning. The organ house synth was also created using advice from alex on its basic structure. This was put together in Propellerheads Reason.

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Lo-Fi meets Convolution

Wed, 05 Apr 2017 05:04:32 +0000

For this project I wanted to explore some of the techniques used in Lo-Fi hip hop production, as well as the way convolution reverb can be used to modify space in music drawing influence from some of the work of Tennyson.

The piece was composed using samples from Freddie Freeloader by Miles Davis, Juicy by Notorious B.I.G., and an episode of Dr. Phil. The audio was processed with impulse responses for a speaker cabinet, a church, and a sports arena, as well as low pass and band pass filtering implemented in Propellerheads Reason 9. Most of the samples were also heavily time stretched for the resulting artifacts, and some were run through an artificial vinyl dust generator.

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Reflections on Music for Oscilloscopes

Mon, 13 Feb 2017 15:17:52 +0000

Visualizing sound appears to be quite the open ended world for experimentation if our lecture with Golan Levin was any indicator. While an A->B sound to audio structure certainly has a lot to explore on it’s own, what caught my eye the most was the way some of the artists we looked at had the sights dictating the sound as much as the other way around. This was very evident in the Norman McLaren piece Synchromy, where the sonic and visual elements were generated at the same time from the same medium. The piece that interested me the most however (and has lead to lots of fun listening time since then) is the Music for Oscilloscopes project by Jerobeam Fenderson.

The kickstarter video by itself is a tour de force of weird sounds colliding with themselves in green shapes you might never expect soundwaves to make. Any sound in this video would be sufficient fodder to build entire songs around in the psy-trance electronic area (Think this type of stuff), yet the visual element remains surprisingly cohesive. It certainly makes me wonder how various processing effects might change the outcome of these green crossing points, or what the visual outcome of changing one axis of the oscilloscope’s color might be. More to the point however, this piece does seem to produce a perfect middle point with audiovisual work where the audio would mean much less without the visual context as would the visuals with no audio. Hopefully this sort of synergetic behavior is something we can work towards in class on one project or another.

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