Homework 1: Homebrew

This is Michael Svolos's submission for Music 220b HW 1. It's a composition called "bike is short for bicycle".

Files:

To run this program, place the folder labeled audio in the same directory as the ChucK file. My initial goal with this project was to create a piece that focused on the rhythm domain, rather than pitch. This was inspired in part by the idea of recording a bicycle, which has lots of clicking and gear shifts, and by an interest in dance music. This goal of shifting away from pitched elements fell apart when I realized I could make a synthy bass sound by playing a single click of a bike's gears many times a second. This led to the bass line that augmented the rhythms of the piece, and from there the rest of the roadmap developed. The biggest challenge for me was patience. Each "instrument" in the song took lots of tweaking to get to a place I liked, and arranging all the pieces together was painstaking. I'm happy with the result, though - it was a fun project. When faced with every option ChucK (or any other music creation tool) provides, it's easy to be overwhelmed, so the limitation this assignment provided helped keep me grounded. This assignment used all original recording, and starter code as credited in the .ck file.