12/5/17
Music 220A Final Project
Kyle Laviana
PROJECT DESCRIPTION

My final project for Music 220A looks to incorporate rhythmic oscillation into an ambient vocoder. Inspired by the synthetic “chunkiness” of songs such as Daft Punk & The Weekend’s I Feel it Coming, I wanted to both create my own autonomous vocoder and emulate an intense musical pulse throughout it.


The vocoder inputs external audio and MIDI signals and reconstructs the audio signal to match the pitches of the MIDI signal. Using ChucK, the program runs both the audio and a MIDI-informed synthesizer through a Fast Fourier Transform and deposits the ensuing data into two distinct spectrums. The spectrum from the audio input is then mapped to that of the synthesizer input, at which point the resulting array is run through an Inverse Fast Fourier Transform, which converts the sound signal back to audio that we recognize as audio mapped to MIDI pitches.


The four ChucK files shown below are able to run the Oscillating Vocoder from any computer affixed to external MIDI and Audio input. vocoder.ck runs the vocoder without arpeggiation, oscillatingVocoder.ck runs the vocoder with random octave shifts every .3 seconds, and oscillatingSynthesizer.ck adds a layer of synthesized arpeggiation in sync with oscillatingVocoder.ck. Initiate.ck maps each of the these ChucK files to be triggered by user-specified MIDI notes.

-- Kyle Laviana

VIDEO DEMONSTRATION

Hide and Seek by Imogen Heap

Audio routed through Ableton Live 9, Scarlett Focusrite 2i4, & Akai Miniak