Homework 1

This snippet uses data from the annual sheep population (in 1000s) in England and Wales, between the years 1867 and 1939. I chose this dataset specifically because of how ridiculous I found it, and realized that none of the other data sets made me laugh as much… There seems to be a lot of variation in the beginning, a bit of steadiness in the middle, and a return to some oscillations closer to the end. I used a sawtooth wave generator (SawOsc) which is a personal favorite (I've been making instruments out of them for years now :) ), and messed around with the frequency multiplier and amount of reverb, and just had a lot of fun in the process! (It's not much, but it's a start and I think it sounds pretty cool!)

Here’s the hilarious dataset I used, which is from DataMarket:

This is the code that I used, after playing around with numbers a bit:

And here's the final audio file, which I recorded using rec.ck (very quick and easy, and is explained online!):

And to answer the questions:

1) We percieve sound 'loudness' on a logarithmic scale, meaning that we are more sensitive to changes in amplitude at the lower end than the same change at a higher amplitude. Squaring the gain lets us smoothen out the sound in terms of its percieved 'loudness', by making changes in amplitude more significant at higher amplitudes than at lower ones. There may be other reasons that I am unaware of, however.

2) MIDI keynums scale linearly whereas frequencies scale exponentially, in terms of moving up octaves. For example, an A in MIDI might be at some value x and again at x + k and then again at x + 2k (would usually expect k to be 12, but not necessarily), while As would have frequencies along the lines of 220, 440, 880... Hz. In a sense, using MIDI keynums converts an exponential scale into a linear one which we can use more easily.

3) The update value is what determines the length of the note. In my example, this length is 300ms, meaning that the note being produced will be changed slightly faster than three times a second. Increasing this value will make each note longer (decreasing the tempo and increasing the duration of the piece), while decreasing this value will have the opposite effect (increased tempo, decreased piece duration).