Music 220B Homework 2 ~ Homebrew ~

Elena Stalnaker | Winter 2022

"We Are Your Final Project" - Final Version

Notes:

The last parts of the process for making this piece felt a bit rushed, but I'm still happy with where it ended up. In a way, its less polished state fits the theme of joyful chaos I was going for. I needed to break it into 2 separate chuck files, because if I had too many instances of my chord(); function in one file, it would eventually start clipping horribly at a certain point. To record, I used record-auto-stereo.ck from examples and added each file in succession. I actually added the second one a little late in my second take, but I think it worked rhythmically. One of the main challenges of making this piece was the sheer number of samples I collected. It took a lot of time just to cut them up and export them, let alone to listen to them again and choose how to fit them together and which ones to keep and discard. I didn't have time to listen to them all again, so I just tried ones with the most promising titles and I'm sure there's a lot of good ones I missed. I am quite proud of my use of arrays to make many instances of SoundBufs and KSChords in this piece. It's a mark of how far I've come since 220A that I was able to intuitively realize that would be helpful and easily figure out how to implement it.

Code: Homebrew Code Part 1 / Homebrew Code Part 2

Audio Files:

WARNING: the piece has a wide dynamic range and sudden loud parts.

Take 2 (play as in class example):

Take 1:

Milestone 1: Rough Draft/Work in Progress

My field recordings are all of my friends goofing off, and the sounds range from silly to heartwarming to demonic. I wanted to capture a synthesis of all those moods through my musical filter, highlighting my friend's weirdness and their loveliness. I messed around with comb filters to try and bring out the melodies in cackling laughter and chopped up bites of spoken phrases. I've found that putting a sample that moves up and down through a KSChord means different notes pop out at different times. I used delay to highlight the guttural craziness of a sample of someone roaring the word "YEAH," and am experimenting with using it as a beat though I'm not sure how well it's working. I also realized if I put multiple files into the same soundbuf, the soundbuf gets louder while they overlap, which makes for a cool effect.

Code: Milestone 1 Code

Audio File:

WARNING: it has a wide dynamic range and sudden loud parts.

Milestone 0: Collect Sounds

For this milestone, I recorded many minutes of audio of my friends goofing off over the long weekend (with their permission of course). I just spent the last several hours cutting it up into isolated sounds I would like to use in the piece. I have more sounds now than I can easily count; and many ideas for how to combine them. I want this piece to be playful, and to mess with the idea of taking short samples out of context and putting them back together in a way that defamiliarizes them, but using mostly speech samples rather than kitchen or door sounds. I want people to wonder what was happening to create these samples. One hiccup I ran into was that I forgot to start normalizing the clips until halfway through, so now I'm going to have to spend a lot more time going back and normalizing the first few dozen.

Question: Is there an efficient way to upload a lot of different soundbufs at once? Or do you have to do each individually?