Music 220B HW3: modic cide - live version

Code

The code is found here on the live branch.

Description

For this homework, I decided to make a live version of my 220A final project: modic cide. The piece is very percussive-focused, with three components: An underlying ostinato that is played through the entire piece. This is two BandedWg's playing the same rhythm at slightly different tempos - i.e. a Reich-style phasing pattern, a polytempo percussive instrument, and a simple Blit that servers as a bassline.

Both the polytempo percussion and the Blit bass are derived from the ostinato. The polytempo percussion is a bunch of sporked tremolos that are all at different tempos, the tempo comes from the composite rhythm of the ostinato: for example, if there is 3000 samples between strikes in the ostinato at the time of sporking, that will be the tempo of this specific voice. When a bunch of these are running concurrently it creates interesting composite patterns.

The Blit bass consists of two Blits - one at a previously specified freq (220 or 110 Hz in this case), and the other's frequency is offset in term of the ostinato's rhythm like above.

The live element is me controlling the polytempo perc and the bass using my midi controller (a Launch Control XL). Volumes of the two elements are controlled via the faders.

For the polytempo perc, the button below the fader launches a new spork that will begin swelling. The duration of this swell is controlled by the dial above the fader, which I can set anywhere from 0 to 60 seconds.

For the bass, I use the two buttons below the volume fader. The top one sets the frequency of the bass to 220hz and the bottom to 110hz. Every time a button is pressed, the secondary frequency is recalculated as well.

My previous other goal for this homework was to make the piece ambisonic as well as live. I did manage to make progress on that front (see the ambisonics branch on the github link). However, due to a mix of issues including not having direct access to the listening room yet and other technical issues with ChucK and miniAudicle it's not currently in a presentable state. So, I decided to only focus on the live portion as my deliverable for homework 3.

Milestone 1

My hw3 is a reworking of my 220a final project: https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~nshaheed/220a/fp/index.html. I'm going to make a live version of it that uses my launch control xl midi controller as well as spatialize it using ambisonics instead of stereo.

The code is found here on the live branch.

The demo video is found here.