These are a couple snippets of audio that I made during my first quarter at CCRMA for assignments in the class Music 220a. All were created using the ChucK programming language

  • The Bells
    In this piece, additive synthesis was used to create the following sounds:
    • Balong Bell: The balong is a Balinese instrument that consists of a group of bells that are played with mallets. Since they are bells, they have an inharmonic spectrum. I used values for the frequencies of the first 5 partials that I found in a book online to recreate the sound of these bells using additive synthesis. I played a fast eighth-note melody with my bell instrument using a Balinese 7 tone scale called the pelog.
    • Pad: This sound is a harmonic sound that was created using a sine wave oscillator and contains the fundamental pitch and the next four odd numbered harmonics whose amplitudes rolloff proportional to the inverse of the square of the harmonic numbers where every other harmonic has a negative amplitude. I used this sound to create three voice chords that played over the top of the balong instrument’s sound.
    • Sub Bass: The sub-bass consisted of a single sinusoid played at a low frequency. I added this sound to balance out the frequency spectrum of my composition. The piece is odd-metered, consisting of a 9/8 phrase alterating with a 10/8 phrase and features an eighth note pattern on the balong bells with the pad sound on top of it and the sub bass sound below. The entire song was written using ChucK code including the arrangement, timing and performance of the melodic phrases.
      The ChucK code can be found here.
      For the best listening experience, subwoofers or speakers with good low-frequency response recommended.
  • Just Sweep Me Away
    This composition features a short snippet of an odd-metered (10/8) 170bpm beat. It consists of a sawtooth oscillator based pad sound being fed through a lowpass filter that sinusoidally sweeps over a user defined frequency range. The pad sound is also fed through a reverb ugen to give it further depth. There is also a high-hat sound that was created by feeding noise through a bandpass filter and an ADSR. It also gets fed through a reverb ugen for added depth. The last two items in the piece are a clap sample and a kick drum sample. The clap sample is fed through a bandpass filter whose cutoff frequency is being randomly changed over time and is also fed through a delay unit whose delay time is being changed randomly each time. It is also fed through reverb and it’s playback speed is being varied to change it’s pitch and duration. Finally, the kick is also being played at variable speed and fed through the reverb unit. Enjoy!
    The ChucK code can be found here.
  • Feeling the Vibes
    This composition uses the physical modelling ugens available in ChucK. I decided to use the ModalBar ugen to create a (mostly) harmonic vibraphone sound to use for the melodic aspect and used the Shakers ugen to create rhythm. In the beginning of the piece, I modulate the parameters of the vibraphone sound to go from a metallic click sound with no notion of tone to the full vibraphone sound with corresponding tone and physical characteristics. For the rhythmic shakers portion, I use the “tambourine” and “little rocks” presets to create a complementary rhythm. At the end, after changing to a different melodic sequence with the vibraphone sound, I reverse the process that occurred in the intro by fading the vibraphone sound back in to a metallic click sound which is subsequently faded to nothing.
    The ChucK code can be found here.



These are three compositions that I made quite a while ago (ca. 2004) in Cubase using just audio samples and VST synths and effects

  • Pacific Cola


  • In Limbo


  • Beached