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Project 4 Research Project

For this research project, I decided to continue work on a patch that Nick Fredericksen designed for our group in Project 2 (the MIDI violin) and subsequently wrote a piece for loop violin and grain synthesizer. With some help, I attached a loop patch to the end of the grain synthesizer in Max, and utilized a hardware Boss RX-30 Loop pedal as a convenience looper to make the piece a little more seamless (less starting and stopping). Since my presentation didn’t go according to plan, (the connection in my violin was faulty), here is another recording of what I intended to do.

Here is the loop patch I used within the grain synthesis patch

Production Piece

For this project I decided to revisit something I was working on previously and spice it up with some field recordings from freesound.org, some EQing, and heaps of convolution reverb. I originally made this piece as I was watching the sunrise and tried to capture that feeling.

Reverb, distortion, and more.

For this short excerpt I began with a half-second clip of an old Microsoft mouse click, paired together as sixteenth notes. I laid this over both a distorted and reverberated low machine hum from outside of CFA, and the ticking of a stove igniter. In order to really fill the distortion of the low machine hum, I added some wind noise to add stress to the environment. To add ambience after the build, I used an excerpt from a Bach piano concerto, reversed it, expanded it slightly, and added reverb!

Sound Design Piece

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Byf2d2P0j0eremNsN2pQVl9qcTg/view?usp=sharing

For this piece, I tried to recreate some of the noise music that I’ve listened to based on some of the techniques Alexander showed us last week. I took two recordings from freesound, one of a man screaming and the other of soda being poured into a cup. I used the soda sound for a base rumble underneath the piece. This was mainly done by pitching the sound downward and adding reverb. I then distorted the scream in order to create the static on top. I edited this sound through time stretching and different filters. I used ableton live and also used a Noise Vocoder to distort the sound even further.

B8man

For this project, I used a ton of different samples and sounds. My main samples are from Peter Gabriel’s Big Time, and Huey Lewis & The News’ Hip to be Square. I also took some samples from the movie American Psycho of Christian Bale speaking.

The program I used is called MuLab, and also causes occasional white noise over the rest of the audio, as it is a free program. I paulstretched both songs to around 69.6 bpm, and then pitch shifted them both down 6 semitones. I then added some EQ’d drums over Big Time. The drum samples I got mostly from Alex’s sounds. I automated a distortion to ramp up from the beginning. I added some effect called a “spiral echo” on the vocal sample of Christian Bale saying “I’m just a happy camper”, and automated the pitch direction of that echo. There is a grain synthesis module for MuLab, but it is difficult to use. I recorded myself messing with the grain synthesis to start with a really low grain rate then increasing towards the middle of Big Time, then decrease playback speed by a ton. I used a comb bass filter hit, pitched it a bunch after the grain synthesis on Bit Time and added a really low noise over Christian Bale freaking out over Paul Allen’s business card. I really liked how this turned out, it sounds way different and much more personal than the rest of the track. The final section includes a slowed down version of Hip to be Square that has the “Happy Camper” sample again.

Everything has EQ on it, the master output has compression running.

The general concept to this piece follows the facade of Patrick Bateman’s seemingly perfect life, but he can’t cope with being perceived as normal for that long. As in the movie, Bateman then has a moment where he loses it slightly in the business card scene, then continues with his attempt at fitting in for the rest of the piece.

I Know Nothing

Throughout this semester, I’ve tried to tackle a bit more of the electronic / tech-augmented genre of music. I’m not sure that I even really understand it yet, but what I do understand is that there is so much to learn. I enjoy the idea of soundscape design, so I attempted something along the lines of a strange, insect-y kinda percussive little diddy.

nostalgia

The foundation for this piece is a collection of field recordings I gathered this past weekend. Some of the techniques incorporated include granular synthesis, time stretching, side-chain compression, re-sampling, filter/pan automation and convolution reverb.

Without tainting your initial perception I was going for a feeling of longing and reflection, hope you were able to experience that as well.

Phasors and Organs

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.