Revision as of 15:23, 30 March 2013

Assignment #2: single-hemi instrument

This assignment asks you to work with the quintessential laptop orchestra building block: laptop + a single hemispherical speaker array, and create a short sound sketch for it!

Milestone Check (due April 9)

For the milestone check (by April 9 at the latest), install ChucK (http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/) and miniAudicle (http://audicle.cs.princeton.edu/mini/). Check that you can run example codes (http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/doc/examples/) and make some sounds.

We highly recommend that you do this as soon as possible, so that you can take advantage of TA office hours if you run into any problems.

Designing your Instrument

• Brainstorm ideas with your SLOrktastic group so that your (individual) instrument can later be adopted to a chamber music setting
• Create an instrument for a single hemi using ChucK, taking advantage of the multi-channel aspect
• Consider issues of playability, expressiveness, and use in an ensemble setting
• Craft a very short piece for your instrument, demonstrating at least 1 axis of musical contrast (e.g. rhythm, melody, timbre, dynamics)
• If you end up using STK Instrument unit generators (http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/doc/program/ugen.html), we strongly encourage you to enrich the sound by use of filters and other unit generators.

Presentation Details

• Due date: April 17 (Wed)
• You'll be given 5 minutes to demo your instrument in class on April 17.