This project was inspired by one of my current favorite artists, Ellie Goulding. While her singles on the radio are catchy in their own right, most of my favorite work from her are tracks from her older EPs and albums. It's amazing how she plays around with synesthetic and seraphic soundscapes that complement her songwriting. The production is inspired by and contains tropes of folktronica, dub, and electropop. (I think she even mentioned in an interview that she’s equally inspired by Bjork as is she is by Beyonce, and she’s actually one of few people who’s friends with the enigmatic Burial). 

It’s evident she makes use of acoustic loops, lots of reverb, vocal layering, and echoes to achieve her sound. I tried to emulate this using ChucK. 

This project became more about the process than the end result. While I personally don’t find the sound file I created to be particularly exhilarating, I discovered some of the benefits and difficulties of composing with ChucK. Most importantly, I used this project as an opportunity to try some of the several instrumental ugens in ChucK's arsenal. 

I wanted the main “melodic” line to be a vocal line that I didn't have to record, so I attempted using the VoicForm ugen. It sounded mechanical and lacked authenticity, and after trying the Flute (difficult for an actual flute player) and Moog ugens, I settled on the heavy metal one. 

While I envisioned hearing several different voices in distinct harmony with one another, my collection of harmonic lines came out just sounding overly blended. Adding string lines did not help. Although I wanted to layer the voices on top of the strings, it actually sounded better placing the strings a few octaves higher than the voices. I also found that if VoicForm ugens are not the only ones used, changing the phoneme does not yield detectable differences. 

I also considered adding a chiptune line as a secondary main voice, but its timbre clashed severely with that of the heavy metal guitar. 

Summed up, the major lessons I learned were:
a)	achieving cool sound affects with ChucK and implementing delays and reverb is pretty simple
b)	if one wants to layer several different sounds, perhaps use real recorded samples as opposed to ugens, or just be really good at understanding how to balance the gains so it doesn’t come out sounding muddy (which I think is what happened in my case)