"ASMRdcore" Homebrew Recording
"ASMRdcore" Homebrew ChucK
QUICK-GLANCE PROGRAM NOTES:
ASMRdcore is an interpretation of dark techno through the autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), a sensory reaction to soft, chilling
sounds such as whispers, crackles, pops, etc. It uses recorded sounds of door-knocking, carpet-rubbing, pot-boiling,
dumpster-kicking, floor-squeaking, pot-tapping, and groaning to make an alternative take on a genre that's so often devoid of real
recordings. Some processing techniques include granular sampling and binaural imaging. The piece is 2 minutes and 30 seconds in length.
INSTRUCTIONS:
To run this piece in ChucK, make sure you have the sample folder "Homebrew" in the same directory as "homebrewfinal.ck", where
all relevant ChucK code can be found and run as a new shred.
CREDITS:
All sounds recorded by Daphne on an iPhone X and iPhone 11, 2020-2022, stored at this address.
Binaural class written by Jeffrey in 2008, as found on his Blogspot. All other code written by Daphne Jan 16 - Jan 31 2022.
PROCESS:
Upon hearing Paul Lansky's "Table's Clear" in class and reading the spec for this assignment, my knee-jerk reaction was to create
something with ASMR. ASMR a hard concept to pinpoint, but for me, it's often associated with eating food
(mukbang, if you're familiar) and the sounds of the mouth. This brought me to recording whispers and mouth movements, but eventually
led me to collection sounds from the kitchen, since food was on the mind. It wasn't until collecting a majority of samples that I felt
drawn to a techno angle for the assignment, but once I committed to it, everything fell into place quite quickly. I think the asymmetry
of ASMR's tenderness and techno's severity make a tasty match for this kind of project.
I knew I wanted to attempt writing code for granular sampling (still not sure if that's the right term for this) because that kind of
audio manipulation is very effective at getting an ASMR response if done right, and I'm proud of the small amount of code it took to
pull that off. From there, binaural movement felt like a natural progression in the ASMR direction, but after trying to write something
on my own for half an hour, I knew that I either needed read a healthy dose of a psychoacoustic textbook, a research paper, or someone
else's code. Luckily, a quick Google search found exactly what I was interested in (someone else's code), and a bit of rearranging and
slimming down brought the Binaural section of the code you can read in the file.
Assembling all the sounds and techniques also seemed to flow pretty naturally, since there's so much techno to take inspiration from
and so many conventions that are ripe for breaking. I ended up being faithful to ideas like sidechaining, rises, and rhythm patterns,
but deliberately breaking rules about changing tempo, payoff/"drops", and just general sound composition. Techno is a place you rarely
hear recorded sound, and starting from solely recorded sound meant that I needed to be intentional with which rules to follow,
otherwise it wouldn't sound a whole lot like techno.
From Milestone 1 to the final draft, lots of changes to structure happened, and I introduced a lot of code that let me play with the
expressivity of certain instruments in the mix, like pitching or filtering the kick to get more timbral variety, or even modulating the
master tempo. Figuring out how to make all the codes and functions I've written obey a steadily increasing/decreasing tempo was
unexpectedly tricky, but knowing the solution now, I feel like I'm getting the hang of ChucK conventions and how to write clean code.
I also added a new instrument: a bassline, taken from the sound of tapping a plant pot, slowed AND pitch shifted to satisfactory
bassiness. I tried my best to mix everything to techno-ish levels and at the very least not blow anyone's eardrums out.
Please enjoy and thanks for reading!
Milestone 1 Recording
Milestone 1 ChucK
My intentions for my Homebrew assignment is to fold in quotidian recorded sounds into
my love of weird techno (for anyone into similar stuff, I love work from Blawan, Giant Swan, etc.).
I've taken sounds of dumpsters,
squeaky dining hall dish conveyers,
squeaky shoes on the CCRMA lobby floor,
my friend groaning,
knocking on my dorm door,
butter fizzing in a pot, and other semi-annoying sounds, and
tried to fit them into a techno-y pacing.
Techniques I've tried to use so far include granular sampling (using code I wrote with only the vague idea
of what granular sampling actually means), and a Binaural class written by a CCRMA student named Jeffrey
from 2008. His blog post about the code is written here.
I tried to combine my granular algorithm with the binaural sound and it was kind of ASMR and scary which was delightful.
Next, I'll try to extend the piece with more sounds and distinct sections, and try to vary the instruments (especially
the kick drum) more throughout.
Thanks for listening!