This chucku started as an exploration of what kinds of sounds I could make with white noise and a resonance filter. I wanted to build something with an element of randomness and I wanted it to change gradually over time, but without guiding it too much. I settled on randomizing the direction of movement meaning that the pitch tends to "settle" at different times around different frequencies. When I started listening to it, it sometimes reminded me of the flight of the bumblebees, but with more wind.
This chucku is a variation on one of the chuck examples. I liked the original sound of the filtered impulse, but I wanted to do something different with the panning. What I wanted to do is have the panning consistently go back and forth from far left to far right. My original code was way too long and I got pretty stuck because I couldn't seem to figure out how to make it shorter. Eventually I remembered that sine functions exist and that even though it wouldn't be linear like what I had before, it would still do the trick.
It's a bit of a running joke with my friends that ever since I discovered LaCroix I don't drink normal water anymore (which is not true btw). So when I was brainstorming sound logo ideas with Cara, this one obviously came up. At first I dismissed it, but once I thought about it a bit more, it seemed like a good choice. I wanted my sound logo to convey the bubbly sound of fizzy water but also have a melodic and bright element to it to add more flavor. I struggled a lot with the bubble sounds, but with a lot of tweaking eventually got to a sound that I liked.
When I started working on this assignment, I was having trouble settling on an overall theme for the sounds I was going to record. I had a lot of ideas but none that I liked a lot. So I decided to just carry around my recorder for a day and record everything I came across. When I got into the car to go shopping, it was raining and I noticed the sound of the wipers, since it's not a sound I hear that often. When I got home, I sat in the car recording all the different sounds I could find. When I sat down to piece them together in someway, one of the first things I noticed is the inherent rhythm in a lot of the sounds. Both the pace of the clicking of the turn signal and the sound of the windshield wipers is a very constant and steady sound. I wanted to use that as a basis for my piece and layer in other rhythmic sounds on top of that. That is about as far as I got for the milestone. Since the milestone, I've incorporated melodic elements from the car horn and the seatbelt reminder sound. Although these sounds are pitched, they don't have any changing melodic content. I wanted this part of the piece to be weird and strange, because hearing a car horn x10 slower than normal is weird and strange. I put a heavy lowpass filter on the rhythmic content so that there was still an underlying pulse but that it was otherwise not too audible. I also put the higher melodic sound through a comb filter and slowly increased the delay gain. This made it sound stranger as it went along and eventually get "stuck" on one note and slowly fade out on its own. At this point I wanted to bring the sounds back to "reality" and slowly removed the lowpass filter, as the last note was fading out. The overall effect I was going for was being transported into a different dimension and back again.
Explanation:
The higher level parameter I'm varying is density. I have 3 percussive loops that basically add more notes as the density increases, and make the rhythms more complicated. The melodic loop decreases the note durations as the density goes up, but with some randomness involved. Then there are two loops that play an iPhone ringtone. These are not affected by the same density change, but instead can be shifted up and down in both pitch and tempo.
The controls:
The number keys on your keyboard 1-6 are used to toggle each of the 6 loops. They sync automatically to the downbeat. The two keys below each of the numbers 1-4 are used to adjust the density levels of those tracks. For track 1 it is "Q" to go up a level and "A" to go down a level; for track 2 it is "W" to go up a level and "S" to go down a level; for track 3 it is "E" to go up a level and "D" to go down a level; and for track 4 it is "R" to go up a level and "F" to go down a level. For the two ringtone tracks, the pitch/tempo is changed with the up/down arrow keys on your keyboard. They are synced to each other and can not be controlled independently. Also, changing the tempo of these changes the tempo of all the other loops.Finally, there are two structural options available. Pressing the space bar will turn off loops 1-4 and turn on loops 5-6, and pressing the enter key will turn everything off.
For this piece, I wanted to use the sounds of my dog. My dog Lola is an overall quiet dog, she doesn't really bark, but when she does make noises they are very funny and cute. The two sounds I recorded were her growling while playing with a toy and her barking in her sleep.
When I ran the sounds through LiSa, they started to sound like aliens and monsters, so I decided I wanted to create a kind of alien soundscape. Originally, I wanted to set up trackers to strap to Lola that will change various parameters as she moves around. I realized, however, that although that might have created some interesting textures, I wouldn't have been able to create any kind of narrative or have any control over the structure of the piece.
With this musical statement, I want to evoke the feeling of being alone in an unknown place, not knowing what's around you and not knowing what is happening. I wanted it to feel like you're on an alien planet, weightless and floating around, trying to understand your surroundings. Are the aliens dangerous? They are surrounding you, but the sounds they make are menacing but not downright aggressive...