Category: Uncategorized

I noticed a lot of Alex’s music has a big sound to it. So I was trying to capture that in this demo of a Glass Animals Remix I made during class! [https://clyp.it/bqyc244c]

Taking Kirk Pearson and BIT’s Indian Head Test Pattern (which I helped compose and produce) as a springboard, I delved into exploring convolution reverb. I took both other pieces I have composed and sounds I have recorded, edited them, then used them as impulse responses to create this drone-y piece that moves through different sound worlds. The technique that struck me most about both Alexander’s music and the other stuff he showcased us was convolution reverb, and I hoped to emulate the really beautiful soundscapes that I heard.

The biggest thing I took away from Panos’s couple days of teaching was the importance of putting your listeners in a space. I really tried to accomplish that with this track and also employed a good amount of the processing techniques that Alexander is very adamant about ( a lot of waveshaping).

For my personal project I wrote a program in Max that manipulates polyrhythms in a mathematical way. I did the manipulation with tempo in each of the channels. So if the new tempo is x0, the old tempo is x1 and the polyrhythm is y, then x0 = x1 multiplied by 1/y. It is hard to visualize with just the formula but all the math is in the patch which is copied below.

Technical:

We used OpenCV to process a live stream of a Go board captured with a Logitech HD webcam. The OpenCV program masked out the black and the white in the stream in order to isolate the black and white go pieces on the board. It then used OpenCV’s blob detection algorithm to find the center of each piece on the board. The program detected the edges of the board to interpolate the location of each intersection on the board, and compared the blob centers to intersection positions in order to output two continuously updating binary matrices that indicate where all the black and white pieces are on the board. The matrix data was then send to Max using OSC.

Within the Max patch, the matrix of black pieces was used to control a step sequencer of percussion sounds. The matrix of white pieces was split in half, where the left half controlled 7 drone sounds and the right half controlled 6 melody lines. Depending on where the white pieces were, drones would sound at different points in the measure and certain notes of the melodies would play.

Compositional:

We used Logic Pro X to create all the sounds that were heard on the board. The percussive sounds came from numerous drum patches designed by Logic ranging from kick drums to frog noises. The melodic pieces was based off of A Major suspended drone(ADEFA#C#E), synth bass noises and LFO sound effects. Since the drones were created in a loop, there was a bit of a problem with clipping at the end of 4 bars, so we created swells within the drones so they would fade out by the time the loop would begin to clip. The melody was on a fixed loop as soon as a stone was put down and faded naturally while the percussion sounds were based on a 3+3+2+2+3 rhythm based on the 13 spaces of the board.

Video:

Patch:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3dc0Zpl8OsBNTAwZEJnczF3Q1k

moire Speaker test Hans Jenny’s cymatics tests inspired me to attempt recreating similar patterns using moiré patterns.

Originally, I planned to use two sheets of screen printed glass with a transducer attached to the back sheet. Each sheet of glass would have concentric circles printed on the surface. I theorized the glass would vibrate based on tones played through the transducer, creating interference patterns.

https://youtu.be/PkPVMTub-jc https://youtu.be/k5HJ1mV_xY4

This attempt worked slightly, but not to the effect I hoped. I decided to turn this glass piece into a “classic” framed print.

the mat between the two layers allows the middle move slightly as the viewer engages with the print I screen printed the pattern on thermoform styrene to create a water dish.

This test produced interesting results, but the concept seemed to become about dancing water on a speaker, vs. creating cymatic patterns. Additionally, the water spilled everywhere (electronics are involved lol).

For a final test, I created two domes (clear and white thermoforms), attached the white to the base of the transducer and clear to the movement part.

For my individual project, I explored the art of delay.
https://soundcloud.com/oshuarown/caprice-of-meaningless-children

I wrote a piece for flute, viola, and double bass featuring a good amount of rhythmic pizzicato, exported it as a MIDI, and then played around with Logic’s Delay Designer in order to create a rather synergetic piece which maximized areas of the original while still keeping the flavor in-tact. In addition to that, I put together a small cavernous back-track to give the piece a little more sonic dimension. To cap it all off, I included a synthesized voice repeating the phrase “let’s all have meaningless sex and meaningless children,” which has been stuck in my head for a while.

In performance, I brought the piece’s individual parts together in MAX and created a pretty simple spatialization element, to make the piece a little more dynamic.

Linked here is a PureData patch that randomly adjusts the levels of 4 sine waves that make up an A minor chord. In this patch I used the line object to smooth the amplitude changes.

PD Random Mixing

An attempt at rave visuals – ESS Personal Project

Summary:

Earlier in the semester I attempted to make reactive rave visuals in Max and decided to continue with it for my personal project. I wanted to make something that was exactly in time to the music and ideally utilize older footage of people dancing (particularly my favorite video on the internet).

Max Patch:

The max patch takes midi input from Traktor(a popular program for DJing) which gets brought into the patch as a bang on every beat of the current song. This bang then causes a jit noise matrix to reconfigure itself. This noise matrix is laid over a jit video object which, on each bang, receives a semi random frame number to jump to from a drunk object. This causes the video to keep repeating certain segments while advancing overall.

Patch code:

----------begin_max5_patcher----------
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-----------end_max5_patcher-----------

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.