ChucKu 1
My main goal with this ChucKu was to evoke the ChucKy aesthetics that dominated
my senior year of high school, which mainly consisted of humble little bleeps and
bloops randomized on some tonal scale and put into NRev at a modest mix. Now I'm
doing that in three lines, with a little extra detuned flair, and with BlitSquare.
I've never used this UGen before but I love the short out-of-the-box filter gestures
you can make with it, which was perfect for a ChucKu. You should need nothing but ChucK
to run this.
ChucKu 2
I wanted my second ever ChucKu to be some sort of gesture to where I'd like to head, which
is a bit more elegant and tied to the poetics of ChucK herself. Making tonal music is no
longer a goal of mine in ChucK, which is relieving because it can sometimes be a hassle to
artificially inject that kind of approach into the language. ChucKu's like this just look
so much more suited for the world it inhabits. I'm also somewhat trying to move away from
randomness as the centrally interesting thing, and have more faith in my compositional
abilities to be intentional and precise.
SubNoise seems like a very expressive UGen that I'd love to use more often, and it was
surprisingly easy to get working with so few instructions. You should need nothing but ChucK
to run this.
Sound Logo (ChucK) —
Sound Logo (Recording)
My sound logo, titled Daph Logo, is a challenge to myself in a few ways: (1) use sporks
meaningfully for the first time (I've flirted with them but never written something that really
needed them); (2) stay away from SndBuf, which I've loved to use in the past, but just felt like
cheating here since the purpose was to explore different nooks and crannies of the language we
haven't encountered; (3) try to make several disparate elements play together and not clash
too much. I think it's quite easy for things to get out of hand and hard to make sense of when
combining things in ChucK, so the key here was making things simple, interesting, and mostly
sticking to their own frequency ranges.
I really wanted to make a logo for myself because I love the strong imagery of this playing in
a room of people as I stroll by outside. I'm a lover of horror movie soundtracks and, even moreso,
music from games like Silent Hill, which was able to evoke really nail-biting and terrifying
feelings from very simple musical elements. All three elements in my logo (the echo-y sewer-y
movements resonating around you, the horror strings, and the anxious throbbing bass) are some
homage to different parts of the Silent Hill OST that is inseparable from my feelings about myself :)
It was challenging to make sense of how to control these elements over time in their separate
sporks, but I realized that more sporks was the answer. There very well be a more elegant and
less spork-y way to accomplish this, but it felt natural in the process of composing. You
should need nothing but ChucK to run this.