chuck thxedit.ck in a command line, or open thxedit.ck in miniAudicle
For this portion of the assignent, we had to dive into ChucK's large example library, pick one file, and edit a single number in the code.
As a student of 220B last quarter, I was no stranger to the implementation of the THX "Deep Note," the studio's signature sound logo.
I realized that since so many of these parameters were individually contrived to create a specific sound character, I could mess with them and really disrupt the intended sound.
I changed the voice initial frequency upper bound from around 300-400 (depending on the version) to 1800, meaning the notes would start within a greater range.
This really changed the nature of the sound, as you can hear, because a lot more of "downward convergence" is happening, hence the title of this sound.
chuck voices.ck in a command line, or open voices.ck in miniAudicle
This sound began with the idea of layering things one on top of the other, perhaps as a metaphor for stress as we begin this new quarter.
However, I quickly found the idea of overtones difficult to implement, but the context of working within a designated musical scale remained.
I began by writing the spawn_voices function, which takes a MIDI note number as input and plays a fancy, effect-laden note at that pitch.
I added a little bit of customization by allowing the choice of a sine or saw oscillator upon the function call.
Working in the A major scale, I set up a constant I-vi-IV-V sine chord progression in the background, and set to work on the randomness.
On top, there's a SawOsc playing random notes within the A major pentatonic scale at a random octave (within a defined range) with a random interval between notes.
The piece ended up being about the notion of "controlled randomness," where we can rigidly define limits to allow things to still sound nice, examples being:
Math.random2 function do all the work.