Music 220B: HW2

Sebastian James

Homebrew: Crisper

This has been, without a doubt, my favorite assignment thus far in Music 220B, and in ALL of Music 220A. While I do enjoy computers, computational acoustics, and electronic music, I began my musical career with a violin. After that came a guitar and then a piano. While I have been focusing primarily on electronic music and other CCRMA-related affairs, I can't let go of my acoustic upbringing. As such, I thouroughly enjoyed being able to electronically manipulate acoustically generated sound.

I didn't run into any major bugs when composing this piece. Rather, when something brought me in an unexpected direction, I decided to push down that path further. I started soley by manipulating time. I used a recording of a can being opened and a sip being taken. I found that with just an 8 second recording and rate and time manipulations to the SndBuf, I was able to compose an entire piece. After trimming this section down to form an intense crecendo, I created a loop starting with the can sample, then adding multiple samples on top of that as a percussion section. Concurrently, I used the KSChord Class to turn the sound of metal bouncing on a rubber floor to develop a synth sound. Using this, I build up a chord section which ends with a classic K6/4 cadence.

The last part is byfar my favorite. Using the same metal-rubber cacophony, I stretched the sample over 10 times its original length and put it through a comb filter, using the Pan2 UGen to spatialize the sound. I thought it was a fitting end to the piece.