When brainstorming for this assignment, I kept returning to the idea of conflict: opposing sound indicating opposing ideas. I've previously encountered and created sounds inspired by rivers, and this concept of conflict immediately suggested to me opposing rivers, rushing toward each other to fill a low, dry plane. As I originally conceived of the sound logo for opposing rivers, I imagined taking advantage of sweeping filters, tremolo effects, and bubbly timbres to evoke the sounds of rushing water. Ultimately, looping, event scheduling, and audio effects in ChucK took me a while to figure out, and I didn't have enough time to realize the aesthetic subtleties of my original idea.
However, given my limited facilty with ChucK, I'm relatively happy with my final sound logo, at least as an initial iteration of my idea. At the core of the sound logo are two arrays of notes, spelling out detuned versions of A major 9 and Eb minor 9 flat 5 chords. The A chord notes are panned to the right, played with SinOsc, while the Eb chord notes are panned to the left, played with TriOsc. When these note groupings first appear, they are somewhat arhythmically stated, using lopsided ChucK timing directions. The next few statements are locked in rhythm, but the looping gets faster and faster until they devolve into chaos. For this "maximum chaos" portion, I replaced the pre-arranged arrays with random frequencies. The penultimate section returns to using the arrays, but it's hard to tell: they're looping so quickly as to sound like percussion. With each section of the sound logo, I played with the levels of reverb and the cutoff frequency of a low pass filter.
Overall, the sound logo expresses the intended opposite, rushing motion, gaining intensity with each section. The climax is intended to represent the reverb-ed out implosion of two rivers meeting with full force. Though the bones of my origianl concept are there, but I do hope to improve my command of ChucK, so as to better express the sounds of which I first conceived.
ChucKu 1
For ChucKu 1, I wrote the (admittedly corny) commented-out haiku, and I used my ChucK code to express the sentiment. The slowly held, fully resonant random notes sound to me like the tension of an approaching morning.
ChucKu 2
ChucKu 2 is more explicitly experimental. No haiku reference here; I just enjoyed playing around with the Pitch Shifter and Shaker ugens!