Ross Dunkel

Music 220a – Homework 2: Radioplay


About


This project consists of a binaural mixdown of a quadrophonic radioplay whose text comes from the first lines of Jack Kerouac's 1962 novel "Big Sur." I have always found this book to be a particularly compelling portrayal of the struggle of a sensitive, creative person doing battle with their inner demons. The struggle for such an individual to fulfill their artistic (perhaps simply their full HUMAN) potential in the face of addiction is beautifully captured in the text in typical Kerouac style.

The main spatialization aspects in the piece involve trying to recreate the soundscape inside the skid row hotel room in which Kerouac finds himself at the outset of the book. The relative coordinates of the room range from (-1, -1) to (1, 1). The narrator is centered at (0,0). An open window to the narrator's left at (-0.7, 0) admits the melancholic tintinnabulation of a nearby carillon. The hotel room door is located in front of the narrator and to the right at (0.7, 0.7) A bottle rolls from (0, 0) across the room to (1, -1) as the narrator stirs from his drunken slumber. A passed out co-hort snores away on the bed at (-0.7, 0.6) next to the window. Additional spatialized elements include a circular, swirling pan of raucous laughter as the narrator "getting silly drunk while hiding in the alleys with bums" and a linear pan from (-1, 0) to (1, 0) of a car driving off as the narrator's ride to Big Sur (and indeed to an imagined salvation), leaves without him (though I believe the old adage holds true that "wherever you go, there you are").

Panning was achieved via the ChucK file DBAP4.ck in miniAudicle using three example files: one for static panning, one for linear panning, and one for circular panning. The resulting quad files were then used to construct each of the four final quadrophonic mix tracks in Audacity. These four .WAV files were then played back in miniAudicle using the quadPlayback.ck and Binaural4.ck files to create a binaural mix of the quadrophonic files. This mixdown is achieved using impulse responses measured in the CCRMA ballroom.

Some additional notes about the sounds used in the composition

First, a key element of the piece is obviously the carillon. I was initially planning to use any appropriately somber-sounding carillon recording that I could find but was unable to find anything suitably morose. So instead I dug up a MIDI file of the song called out in the text: I'll Take You Home Again Kathleen, a popular song written by Thomas P. Westendorf in 1875. (Side note: In spite of its German-American origins, it is widely mistaken to be be an Irish ballad). The trick then was to find a decent sounding carillon instrument to perform the song. After much searching I managed to locate an sf2 soundbank of the Ghent Carillon, though it was compressed in an ancient, difficult-to-decode format called sfark. After much head-scratching, I managed to decode the soundbank and use GarageBand to render the MIDI file in the voice of the carillon to great effect.

Second, the sound of a night out in North Beach was carefully created by layering sounds of a raucous crowd with a stylistically appropriate recording of Charlie Parker (one of Kerouac's great musical heroes) playing "Groovin' High". Additional sounds of glasses clinking and drunken laughter complete the nightlife soundscape.


ChucK Files



Sound Files



Impulse Response Files