HW 3: Granular Synthesis

wake up
by: Victoria Ding

You can listen to this piece by either playing the .wav file or by opening the .ck file and adding it as a shred to the virtual machine. This piece is comprised of sounds related to sleep and alarm clocks including the ticking of a clock, an alarm ringing, and a haunting melody. The overall atmosphere is nightmarish. The main sounds I granularized were the sound of an alarm clock ringing and the beginning pitch of the toybox melody (to create the bell-like sounds). There’s an ongoing tension throughout the piece until the final (raw) alarm clock sounds.     

I struggled a lot with finding sounds that worked well with granular synthesis. Many of the sounds I originally wanted to work didn’t end up making it into my final piece because I didn’t like how they turned out when synthesized. Since this was my first time ever playing around with granular synthesis, I didn’t really have any preconceived notion of what granularized sounds should sound like. However, I think it’s a really cool technique and am happy the way my granularized sounds turned out.  

The original sounds I used / modified can be found here:
toybox_song - https://freesound.org/people/trip_sound/sounds/190489/
ring - https://freesound.org/people/bone666138/sounds/198841/
ticking - https://freesound.org/people/straget/sounds/408741/
evil - https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/413315/
nightmare - https://freesound.org/people/Opossum/sounds/22341/
wind - https://freesound.org/people/InspectorJ/sounds/413549/