Market Song

Jen Carlile

Music 220B HW#1

All of the 'players' in my percussion ensemble are actually snippets taken
from a field recording I made while living in the Netherlands. Every
saturday I would wake up and ride my bicycle to the open-air market in
downtown Rotterdam. I never really needed to buy anything, maybe some
vegetables for dinner or a plant to spruce up my kitchen, but I loved
walking up and down the bustling aisles, listening to the sing-song voices
of the butcher, the vegetable seller, the baker, floating above the crowd
as they (very vocally) made the shoppers aware of their weekly specials.

Market Song is a 5 channel piece written using CLM and Lisp. I used
random processes to control spatialization, rhythm, and dynamics.

In this piece, I focused on creating an atmosphere through the spatialization
of sounds. Some sounds pop out from random corners, some congregate
around certain speakers, others travel from place to place, and some even
make 360 degree loops around the room. By playing with rhythm and
spatialization, I found I could create all sorts of sonic ends—travelling
drones, percussive blips, and much more.

*Update 2/17/05: during class today we discovered that locsig (the function I used to control spatialization) by default linearly interpolates between speakers (a rather dumb way to do it). I've posted an updated version of my code, plus an 8 channel mix using sinusoidal interpolation.

Here is my lisp code
*note, I used a modified version of cut.ins

here is the 8 channel (sinusoidally interpolated) mix of Market Song

and here is a stero mixdown of Market Song

and here is the 5-channel version (with linear interpolation)