I collected most of these sounds (in 'soundfiles.zip') using objects in my room and elsewhere in my dorm. Most are labeled clearly, but some are a tad bit unclear:
- [!].wav is me pronouncing the linguistic "tongue-click" sound represented by the International Phonetic Alphabet symbol [!].
- dadeurak.wav is me playing the Korean three-note rhythmic pattern called 다드락 (dadeurak) on my 소리북 (sori-buk), a type of Korean drum.
For the experimentation part of this assignment (in 'jingju.ck'), I played around with various sounds from my salad bowl and put them in an un-ornamented Beijing opera-style percussion pattern, imitating the sounds of the high gong, low gong, and high cymbals accelerating in a fixed pattern, then stopping.
Here are two ChucK bits that I plan to use as building blocks for my final composition. I have used my sound files in order to replicate 2 things that have been incessantly playing through my head for the past week - Beijing opera and the Gregorian chant "Puer Natus Est Nobis". I have improved the jingju.ck (now jingju2.ck) to incorporate the addition of the high-pitched drum (imitated by my tongue click), and I have also made my fridge sing a fragment from the Gregorian chant as a 2-fridge choir through a low-pass filter. (I attempted to make the fridges sing using formants, but I think I bit off a little more than I can chew there.)
This ChucK composition was designed to reflect 2 states of being my brain usually ends up into when I'm in my dorm room: an extremely scattered, unfocused one, and one of extremely deep, singular focus. The title was inspired by how I usually use a cup of tea to transition from the former into the latter. I attempted to capture the chaos of the former by borrowing percussion patterns from an old recording of reconstructed Tang Dynasty music, arranged in random, increasingly chaotic manners, eventually overlapping. I signified the transition to deep focus (my "cup of tea") by two rather "Zen-like" sounds - my filled thermos and a bell strike from my analog alarm clock, accompanied by the sound of me closing my window. In my now-quiet room, the sound of the refrigerator in the back of my room now becomes audible, and I emulated my state of deep focus by using multiple instances of the refrigerator sound, delay, and filtes to modify its sound into that of a choir singing the plainchant "Puer Natus Est Nobis".