Junk Junction

by Jack Atherton

This piece explores the values of modern American society. Sounds mimic other sounds. Particular sounds with a specific meaning are transmuted into a chaotic, impenetrable aether. Reflect. Rejoice. Regret. Lament. Mourn. Microwave.

Featuring poetry by Campbell McGrath. Concatenative synthesis chugin written by myself.





Since the milestone, I implemented the visuals of the project: fading backgrounds and piles of trash. I also implemented ways to make the audio intensify, which I use during the performance. These involve reverb, delay, and changing the parameters of the concatenative synthesis to spawn shorter grains more rapidly. I wanted to add a few more synthesis objects in this intensify stage, but unfortunately my computer ran out of processing power and thus I had to decide that the technological aspect of the piece was finished.

I also selected the poetry that I read as part of the performance. The original intent was to read sections of The Plenitude, by Rich Gold, but I did not find any passages that quite captured the ethos of what I wanted to communicate.

Finally, I created a score for myself:

Download the Unity source code.

Download the MacOS executable.

Milestone: Working Concatenative Synthesis

The idea for this piece was to use concatenative synthesis to mimic my voice with the sounds of many household objects. I would find or write some poetry about people acquiring too many things, and each time there was a concatenative synthesis match, I would summon a copy of that object and collect more and more of them in the virtual scene. Eventually, I would have the objects "play" a pre-recorded line of the poem in my own voice, and something mysterious and / or explosive would happen to all the objects I had summoned. (Note that my ideas for the performance deviated slightly since this.)

I spent a week writing a UGen for concatenative synthesis in ChucK called ConcatSynth. This milestone is primarily a test of that, since I didn't yet have much time to work on the creative aspects of this assignment.

So far, I am not really satisfied with the sounds I am using or how closely they seem to mimic my voice. I've played around with using other objects (zippers, coins, container of gum) to activate the synthesis and it's not super satisfying either. I think I need to play around more with the analysis and the grain length to make things feel a little better, but I also need to stop expecting miracles from the concatenative synthesis analysis. At the end of the day it is still just a very specific tool.

Preview the milestone here:

Download my Unity code.

Reading Response: Artful Design, Chapter 8

My reflection on my approach to making art and interacting with technology focused on folk art, happiness, human flourishing, and the morality of artifacts.


HW3

Final Version

Blahp

Since the milestone, I worked on three major improvements. In order of increasing meaningfulness:

The parts that remained the same are the gametrak tether controls:

Here's the (minimal, textual) score:


Listen to a recording here:

Downloads:


Milestone

Blerh / Blah

I wanted to be a little more silly with this assignment since I've been so serious in the last few assignments. I had the idea to use "blah"-related sound files after making that sound at my computer. When talking with Noah, I had the idea to make the piece a conversation between two voices.

I'm still working on how to perform what I've made and give it an interesting narrative arc. Technically, I want to make the fade-in a little more gradual and find a better use for the gametrak button.

Listen to a recording here:


Downloads:


Reading Response: Artful Design, Chapter 5 + Interlude

My reflection on the role of the computer in my own music-making practice focused on movement, attention, rhythm, haptic feedback, and control over high dimensional controls.

HW2

Final Version

"A Wrinkle in Spacetime"

I added a few more controls to make the performance of the piece a little more interesting. Now, the controls are as follows:

The title is a reference to how I raise and lower pitch and tempo together, but not at the same rate as if I were just scrubbing through an audio file. (4x the tempo results in just a 4% increase in pitch.)

Because of a bug with the mouse movement in ChucK in OSX, I ended up using Chunity for the final version of this assignment, using Unity as a wrapper to fetch the mouse position and send it into ChucK, which handles everything else.

You can listen to a recording here:


Downloads:


Milestone

I envisioned a slow moving, minimal piece with many swells. In my vision, I would stick with the same chord for a while, then go through a few chord changes.

For the milestone, I implemented something with a synth, a modalbar, and a choir. I created a loop that would play notes from the chords. Then, I created something that would measure the loudness of the microphone and keep a continual decaying sum of that loudness. (I do think the decaying sum needs to be smoothed over a little.)

I use this sum to drive:

Download the necessary files (to run, run the chuck file)

Listen to a draft performance:

HW1

Final Version

"The Print Queue is Full When You Run Out of Time"

My piece ended up being a journey to the inside of a slightly faulty printer. I envisioned this printer as having lots of tiny imps, having a dance party, with three crowds (three ink colors).

The different parts of the song don't have the most aesthetic consistency. Please see title for explanation. (I would have liked to work on this more, but unfortunately I ran out of time and had to go with the first idea I had for every part of the piece.)

You can listen to a recording here:

Download zip folder with ck file and wav files.

Or, download standalone wav file.

Milestone

"Music for 1 Printer (Printer for 1 Music)"

I had the idea to make music exclusively from noises from my very old printer after struggling for a while to come up with a mundane task that had very interesting sounds to use as source material.

I haven't nailed down the exact aesthetic that I want this to take, but I'm thinking a sort of "ghost in the machine" might be appropriate.

Unfortunately, what I have now ends up being more "spontaneous dance party" as soon as I introduce pitched material, which doesn't quite feel like the right direction. I'm working on a few gestures that will be the climax of the piece, but this is sort of amusing to save for posterity.

Download zip folder with ck file and wav files

Reading Response

My brief reading response to Artful Design, Chapter 4, pp 186-205, focuses on the idea of aesthetics as being an active agent of design, the driving force behind all design decisions. I meditate on whether something can ever be mutated away from its core essential original aesthetics.


HW0

ChucKus

Sound Logo

My sound logo is for a project I'm working on, 12 Sentiments for VR. The project involves themes of being (not doing) and calm, so I tried to make a logo that had some tension, but was overall pretty calming. I used timbres that are commonly used in the project.

To run, you will need to download:

You can also listen to a recording here:

(Or: download as wav or mp3.)

Reading Response

My brief reading response to Artful Design, Chapter 4, pp 160-185, focuses on alternatives to the notion that the programmer exists on a separate, higher level than the user / musician, considering ways in which we can lessen the hierarchy there and put all people involved with the software on the same level. (One could also think about the parallel notion of breaking down the divide between performer and audience member.)