Scattered

So, new semester is completely underway and I’m learning to ride the waves of stress once again. It’s going well so far: remembering to drink water, get ~7.5hrs of sleep, and making time for little bits of progress instead of putting things off until I have multiple hours to do a chunk of work. However, I still have my moments of floundering and just not knowing what to work on since there is so much to do… I do have a notebook that I’m using for class notes, to-do lists, and journalling, which helps to periodically flush out my brain so I can concentrate on doing the work rather than just managing the work I have to do. This is why being a Project Manager is its own position in offices, because keeping track of everything AND doing all the work takes a huge toll on concentration. So, just to clear out my head right now, I’m going to start another running to-do list here since it worked well before.

Goals that occupy brain space:

• doing daily stretches with the goal of gaining enough flexibility to sit in lotus position while meditating
• doing 10 minutes of yoga to increase my strength, flexibility, and focus
• generally being more mindful of my posture and trying to engage my core muscles instead of feeling all my tension in my back, shoulders, and neck, because I think that’s the main reason I have issues with deep breathing and getting through long phrases in my clarinet repertoire
• devoting time to spiritual health through meditation, piano improv, and reiki self-treatments, because those are what gives me a sense of greater focus and connection with myself and others
• preparing for UPEI’s Dr. Frances Gray Performance Competition (practicing Poulenc’s clarinet sonata)
• making time for research journal entries
• making consistent progress in gathering my knowledge base for my Inquiry Methods project
• planning my album that I have to make in the month of February for Business of Music
• being the Project Manager for the concert we have to put on in Business of Music
• keep up with the weekly readings for Business of Music
• planning and budgeting for my tattoo
• preparing for my Directed Studies recital (why do I get myself into all this work?)
• being mindful of where I invest my time and ensuring that I’m living according to my principles and encouraging my own self-discovery
• making time to listen to friends
• regularly reviewing and reflecting on notes for my Theory of Computing class (a practice that is suggested throughout university, but I have never found to be necessary until now… so I need to start a completely new habit if I want to have a hope of getting through that course…)
• scheduling a time to get someone to listen to me sing so I can find out if I’m good or not, and whether or not I need some lessons to get me to a level where I can be comfortable singing in front of people (specifically, I want to be good enough to sing in our Music Department’s Spring Variety Show… I have never let anyone hear me sing before, not even my family… so this has always been a huge discomfort for me, but I LOVE to sing, so I really want to overcome this… At this moment, I would be more comfortable stripping in front of people than singing in front of people, because singing has always felt too vulnerable to me, but I’ve gained plenty of body confidence from being in a long-term relationship.)
• I should make time to schedule an appointment with a counselor, but I keep putting it off because I feel too busy and I don’t know what I would talk about, but I’m supposed to try to see a counselor for my anxiety… but, it’s getting better? So I feel like I’d just go in there and say “yeah, I feel terrible sometimes, but I’m way better than I was a year ago, and I’m already taking a bunch of steps to get better, and I have a really good support system of friends and family already… so… shrug?”
• preparing for music festival (memorizing Debussy’s Premier Rhaspodie and some second piece that I haven’t yet decided)
• preparing for National Youth Band

Basically, I’m pursuing self-discovery and actively striving for growth through a variety of lenses: physical, mental, and spiritual health; balancing work and relaxation; rounding out myself (expanding areas that have been neglected due to a fear of failure/mediocrity, like time management, singing, and yoga); and all of these things are basically just the same thing being said in different ways. I am both finding and shaping myself with everything I do.

I have all these things to do, and they can all help me be a better person, but sometimes the work just feels tedious, so it’s hard to take the time to sit down and just DO THE THINGS.

Now I’m going to take at least an hour just to look into schools that have programs for electronic music, so I can assemble a bit of my knowledge base, then I’ll take a break, then I’ll review my notes for Theory of Computing, then another break, then I’ll get started on the readings for Business of Music.

Another Semester Done

I just feel like writing for the sake of… closure? I was planning on working through the Christmas break on this project, but I have enough to keep me occupied, and I need to make more time to relax and take care of things that I neglect throughout the school year like cleaning my room and my workspace… So, for now I just want to recap the running list I have from a few other posts to have a bit of a snapshot of where I am. It’s really therapeutic to be able to look at the crossed-off bits each time I continue this ’cause I get to see that yes, I am doing things!

What I’ve done:

• write a paper for this class, put together my jury program and my proposed recital program, and practice for my jury the Monday after that
• do a take-home exam the Wednesday and Thursday after that
• put away the Wind Symphony music the Friday and Saturday after that
• go to a staff party that Saturday night
• RELAX with my fiancé on Sunday
• set aside a big garbage bag full of clothes for a clothing swap next semester

What’s next:

• continue to declutter in preparation for moving out next year (finally!)
• practice Poulenc’s clarinet Sonata
• schedule a hair-cut
• paint my nails & dye my hair (after it’s cut)
• go to my doctor to follow up on my suspicion of having hypothyroidism
• pick up some kind of tape or something to attach my new weekly schedule whiteboard to my locker door
• go see the new Star Wars!
• make a cool prop that I’ve wanted to make since 2014 and have it done before I graduate (super secret project, it’ll be EPIC!)
• take 3 days to read, sleep, eat, and drink wine (or maybe just tea)
• get training in Reiki to help manage my anxiety
• do some generally festive things (partayy)
• make time to organize my life a bit (like cleaning off my desk and tidying my room)
• make time for practicing and doing work on this project
• attend family holiday things
• get new music into the wind symphony folders before we get back to classes
• start classes again
• set aside time each week to make a weekly schedule and review how well I follow it

This “research journal” entry is probably the least relevant one in terms of my project, but it helps to clear my head a bit, and I’ve grown to depend on writing something each week to organize my thoughts.

Reflective Summary of my Directed Studies Course

As my final bit of work for this long introduction to my journey of learning about electronic music, I am writing this summary to reflect on all that I have learned in over 5 months. I started this course with no prior experience with electronic music concepts, software, or hardware, so I think I’ve come a long way, and I still have so far to go…

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Personal Learning

The mixture of learning new things from basics, like a first-year course, and feeling the need to go in depth with each topic, since it’s an upper-year course, made it difficult for me to stay on track and organize my thoughts. I was so scatter-brained trying to absorb all of this new information that I often froze and couldn’t bring myself to make progress, and I felt horrible about it because I had such high ambitions going into this. I had to practice a lot of self-compassion in allowing myself to realize my limits and recognize that the amount of material we had initially planned to cover was enough for multiple courses, and my inability to learn EVERYTHING in one summer does not make me a failure. I learned enough about various aspects of electronic music that I have a good foundation to continue with personal projects when I have time.

Things I didn’t get to but really wanted to do in this course:

• Work a little bit with PureData and SuperCollider to see what they can do
• Get more experience playing with various interfaces and making notes of the merits of various interfaces
• Technical structures of MIDI and how it interacts with various equipment
• How control voltage (CV) works
• The math behind the synthesis, and which part of the sound wave means what
• Making all the sounds to go with my composition so it could be performed
• Programming an Arduino node for my performer to wear on her head to actually perform the composition I wrote, but there’s a whole course on Arduino programming, so this was definitely an ambitious final project
• Make a good copy of the logo I designed for myself (not course work, but related)

It’s really easy to beat myself up over all the things I didn’t do, but I need to remind myself of how much I DID do! I started this journey knowing nothing, and now I’m thinking that this is what I want to do with my life.

Motivation for Future Learning

Given my struggles with not covering all the material I had hoped to cover, I have so much motivation to keep learning everything that I didn’t have time to explore! I’m in a year-long Inquiry Methods course in which I am researching how to implement electronic music education into UPEI, which will build off of the foundation I got from this course, and it will help me learn about what programs are offered at other universities, and what Masters programs look for in potential students. I might use this blog in my Inquiry Methods project, or I might just incorporate some things from it when I feel like it… I haven’t really figured that out yet. [Edit from me after speaking to Dr. Zinck about Inquiry Methods: he said I could link to posts on this blog for my research journal, so I think I’ll do that!] That Inquiry Methods project will help me organize preparations for Masters applications, because after beginning this electronic music journey, I have so many ideas for big projects! I have ideas for PhD research involving new hardware, but I don’t want to share that on here because it’s going to be a while before I can pursue a PhD, and I really don’t want someone else to take my idea before I get a chance to pursue it.

This one course has opened my mind to so many possibilities for my future that use both my Music degree and my Computer Science degree, and I am PUMPED!

Synthesis Basics

As shown in previous posts, I learned about subtractive, FM, granular, and wavetable synthesis. To go from not even having an idea that these concepts existed, to learning how they work and how to use them is SO MUCH to absorb to form my foundation for understanding how to create desired sounds. I’m glad that I took a long time to digest the basics and let them settle in my mind, because they provide me with a good start to develop the necessary vocabulary to think and learn in this area of study. Messing around with subtractive synthesis and filtering white noise really helped to open my ears to how timbre is shaped by overtones, which was another entirely new concept that I hadn’t previously encountered, and it has strongly affected how I hear and think about sound. I still have a lot of learning and experimenting to become more familiar with filters and the workings of overtones, but at least I have a start and I’ve become aware of that area where I can grow.

The direct link between timbre and overtones blurs the lines between interval recognition and hearing certain timbral shifts. I have a really hard time in melodic and harmonic dictations, because it is ridiculously difficult for me to recognize intervals, especially on different instruments/voice-types, but if you get me to listen to two recordings of different people playing the same wind instrument, I can probably pick out the timbral differences between performers, and their stylistic variances, even though I might have to resort to analogies…too bad we don’t get tested or learn better vocabulary for that kind of ear training. Timbral ear training would also be very useful in general for our Composition classes, because it has a strong effect on orchestration.

Composition

I find it interesting that composition and performance in the typical western classical setting are quite linked: we have generally agreed on a means of communication between composers and performers, and each side can make an educated guess at how the notation will/should be understood. Whereas in electronic music, the composer is often the performer to some extent: the composer has to contribute to the making of sounds, rather than just describing the desired sounds on paper. I think this stems from much of electronic music developing outside the realm of classical training, and it often does not separate the performer from the composer thus eliminating the need to develop a widely accepted form of notation. Given how fast technology is developing, it would be highly impractical to put much effort into developing a way to separate composition from performance in electronic music, but it could be more efficient to have people with different expertise working on a piece: much like a software development team, because I do recognize that most people might not want to specialize in ALL the things. The composer would be like the designer, and someone stronger in sound design would help the composer get the sounds and effects they want. It’s just so much work for one person to think of the whole piece and then also do the detailed work of constructing each sound, but it is ear-opening and really fun!

Software

I mainly dealt with Cubase and Ableton Live. Before this course, the only recording and editing software I ever used was Audacity to make my recording projects for Applied Clarinet. Given my focus in electronic composition was to make a modular piece that can trigger different sections according to the performer for a more organic flow to the performance, Ableton fit better with how I needed to organize my ideas: it has linear editing for each clip, as well as a grid layout to reinforce that modularized way of thinking. I’m happy to have had a bit of a taste of Cubase so I know that it’s there if I need it, but it just didn’t seem to be the tool for my creative goals. Dipping my toes into these two programs has enabled me to experiment with sounds and possibilities that I never would have encountered without this course, and they opened my mind to how the organization of the software can not only shape the technical limitations of a piece, but also the thought process in organizing ideas (modular overview with linear pieces vs linear layers, in this case).

Hardware

This was a whole new world of exploration, and now I see the light of how I will lose my money in order to find all kinds of ways to compose with the colours of the wind. (I make no apologies for those Disney references…they just kind of happened.) I had no idea how much diversity there is in existing hardware, and how many possibilities there are for designing new hardware. Transducer systems are really neat because of how much information can be shared more intuitively than adjusting things with knobs and buttons. Things like Mogees and Korg Wavedrums are able to capture so much expression that I didn’t know was possible before this summer. Then, with things like the Roli’s seaboard and blocks, there’s even more possibility for intuitive expression in electronic music, and I never would have even thought to look up anything like that without this course because it never crossed my mind that that would exist.

I’m really excited to learn more about the hardware being created, and how I might be able to add to this as well as software development to pursue a career in electronic music! I have ideas, but as I mentioned before, I don’t want to share my ideas on the internet because if it ends up being an entirely original idea, I want to be the one to at least spearhead the research because I think it’s really cool and it’s a project I would throw myself into and I don’t want to have to think of another one. (This is just me being a little self-indulgent so I can have Dr. in-front of my name and I think it would be a fun project…)

MIDI

Before this course I had no idea what MIDI was. For me, it was just used to describe the horrible sounds spewed out of my notation software when I chose to hear a playback of my compositions… I WAS SO WRONG! MIDI is super powerful, and it’s an amazing way to make various electronic music equipment work together to make really cool things! It only sounds terrible in my notation software because the samples it’s given are trash and it’s given minimal information about each note so it can’t unleash it’s true power. MIDI is both structured and flexible: you can lay out a framework with pitches and velocity and things, and then pair that with a virtual instrument, and if you decide you want a different instrument, you don’t have to readjust the contour of the line because you already have the framework built and you can fill it with whatever you want, even a standalone synth… MIDI is like a player piano score, but way more powerful and flexible.

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I’M DONE. I hope. Unless this summary isn’t good enough and my instructors pry for more detail… but I think this should be sufficient, along with a complete physical copy of the score for my composition with a title page and performance notes, which will be handed in on Wednesday next week provided everything goes as planned this weekend. 🙂

Housekeeping: What have I been DOING?!

Quick Reflection

I am bad at enforcing my own deadlines.

I am most motivated right before a deadline.

Independent study is HARD.

I have learned a lot, but I have not been a diligent or consistent student.

All of this is okay. I’m slowing working on getting better, and this (never-ending) course has shown me many of my weaknesses, as well as some strengths.

I’m good at learning SOMETHING when I do almost ANYTHING.

I am good at finding ways to put ideas and abstract concepts into musical ideas.

Independent study is REWARDING when I actually buckle down and pursue something interesting.

I have an interesting mix of knowledge that can mingle with electronic music and lead me to career opportunities I never would have considered without this course.

Another Sequencing bit on SoundCloud

Messing around with a sequencer like the BeatStep is a really fun way to brainstorm and play around to get ideas. The way the interface differs from what I’m accustomed to (a piano) for brainstorming is more freeing: I don’t know the exact pitches I choose, and I view the rhythm differently, because I can get easy feedback on complex rhythms at the push of a button. In addition to the freedom of a non-traditional instrument, this exercise provided me with an opportunity to further explore colouristic possibilities with filters, which opened my ears to the possibilities of expressive nuances in electronic music.

How’s that big composition project going?

I have now notated and written some performance notes for parts 1 and 2 out of 4, and I’ve put some of the sounds together. I will not be able to make it work with the Arduino node for now, but some day I will, when I have time to learn everything involved.

I still need to make the rest of the sounds and plan how to perform them with vocals well enough to workshop it. I need to notate parts 3 and 4. I might need to expand on my performance notes a bit. I need to organize a time to workshop parts 1 and 2.

In order to plan out the sounds for the piece, I think I just need to map them out on paper in some colour-coded way to indicate when to trigger various things.

I just need to get this done so I can reflect and move on!!

Loose ends

I need to cover some bit of Arduino learning and MIDI structures, but I just messaged my prof this morning to see how best to wrap that up, and I’m waiting on a decision.

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Lots of learning done, and lots of work left to do, but I’m getting there! It’s like trying to sprint up a hill after jogging for a while on a bumpy surface and constantly losing traction.

Other Synthesis Methods

Once again, I have gotten sidetracked by various applications of concepts rather than focusing on the concepts themselves. It’s like if someone was learning basic Math concepts like addition and subtraction, and they looked up things that use addition and subtraction, and they stumble into more complex forms of those concepts like multiplication and exponents, and suddenly they think they need to learn how a calculator works right down to machine language and it’s so overwhelming that they want to quit. I need to remind myself that I don’t have to learn everything right away. I’m learning the basics now, and anything deeper than that can be another post, or I can demonstrate that knowledge in making my sounds for my composition.

Sound can be reduced to a wave, which is a graph, which can be reduced to numbers. Therefore, there are countless ways to synthesize sounds. We’ve already covered Subtractive Synthesis and FM Synthesis, and here I’m going to touch on granular synthesis and wavetable synthesis before moving on from these topics and pushing through all of this cool knowledge!

Wavetable Synthesis

This uses less memory and less processing power by mapping sounds to a previously generated wavetable. Looking things up in a database is much easier on the machine than doing all the complex Math on the spot to generate the correct wave. I already learned about  this problem solving technique in my Computer Science classes, so the general concept is pretty straightforward.

Granular Synthesis

This still seems a little confusing to me, but I think I have the basics, and my professor can correct me or elabourate in comments if I have this all wrong.

Granular synthesis takes advantage of technological advancements as it requires a lot of processing.  This is based on the same idea as wavetable synthesis, but with an entirely different approach. Whereas wavetable synthesis starts with the small bits of sounds already stored, and just looks them up in a table, granular synthesis finds the small bits (or ‘grains’) in a sound clip. We can use granular synthesis to slow down a recording without altering the pitch because it automatically looks for the repeated grains of sound and loops more in instead of stretching out all the sound waves and lowering the pitch.

Granular synthesis is often used in making shifting soundscapes, so I really want to figure out how to use it for my composition, especially for the transitional sections, but that knowledge can be demonstrated later in my composition.

Sources

http://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/granular-synthesis

https://www.ableton.com/en/packs/granulator/

http://cmc.music.columbia.edu/MusicAndComputers/chapter4/04_08.php

http://synthesizeracademy.com/wavetable-synthesis/

https://www.music.mcgill.ca/~gary/307/week4/wavetables.html

https://theproaudiofiles.com/sound-synthesis-basics/

https://theproaudiofiles.com/granular-synthesis/

http://en.audiofanzine.com/sound-synthesis/editorial/articles/sampling-wavetables.html

 

R&R: Reflect & Revise

This course has been fun and educational, but I’ve also felt a tremendous amount of stress about how to get through everything without going crazy and burning myself out…again. I have so much to learn, and given the independent nature of this course, I also have to figure out how I’m going to learn everything, which adds a whole other level of complexity, because it means I have to decide what the important parts are amongst an infinite amount of knowledge that is all new to me.

I knew how to handle the trap of infinities with my composition, I planned what I want to make after only learning a little bit, and I can modify things later. I need to have that same approach with the technical topics I’m covering: I’ll plan the outline for a post before I get too far into one topic, and I’ll only cover as much as I consider to be useful to me in this moment. If I find myself curious about more details later, then I can always go back and learn more, but I need to stop worrying about covering ‘enough’ of each topic when I’m the one who gets to lead my learning. If I completely miss an important part of a topic my instructors have set out for me as guidelines, then I hope they’ll just let me know I should do some more research.

Sometimes I forget that this course is only the beginning for me. This is when I’m allowed to make mistakes and stumble through all this new information. This is when I don’t have to dive right into everything, I just need to learn that it all exists, so I can look back and learn more later. I’m used to upper-year university level courses being more specific and getting me to do more of a depth-first-search kind of learning, but with this course I need to do a breadth-first-search kind of learning. If I don’t shift my approach, then the amount of material I would cover by the end of this one course would be like 4 to 5 courses worth of work, and those expectations are highly unrealistic.

What I really want to put my effort into is my composition, so I need to put less into the technical blogs, and just use them as a way to touch on the topics I’m covering. I can learn more than I write about, and that learning can be shown through my composition work as well as my blogs.

Time to get back to learning about FM synthesis! Might have another blog for that up later today if all goes smoothly! (Most likely tomorrow, but I like to be optimistic.)

Sound and Synthesis: Subtractive Synthesis

Replication is often how we gain skills; it’s how we build our knowledge-base as a foundation to build new things. Singing intervals trains your voice and ears so you can have the tools to put those intervals in the context of a piece of music. Drawing an object in front of you teaches you to see depth, lines, light, and colours more clearly, so you can take that knowledge and create your own art. Writing poems in various forms gives us a structured way to experiment and find our own voice. Attempting to recreate sounds via subtractive synthesis is teaching me (slowly) how to listen for overtones rather than letting my ears summarize their effect down to a vague term for the colour/timbre of the sound.

It is so easy to get lost in the shifting sounds as I make adjustments with various knobs, so it’s very difficult to accomplish anything that I initially set out to do. However, the fact that I can get so lost in experimenting tells me I must be learning something, and learning is my general mission, right? It’s like if someone sets out to draw a hand, and they spend all their time following the lines within the hand, and learn about the texture and depth created by those lines, but they beat themselves up over not actually finishing the drawing of a hand, even though they still learned so much from the work they did. So, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’ve been learning SO MUCH STUFF, but I couldn’t figure out how to package it up nicely in a post, so I’ve been feeling like a horrible student, and I’ve finally realized how silly that is. Learning new things is a messy process, and presenting it as a polished portfolio-ready product can inhibit the actual learning.

When I was messing around on the Roland GAIA, initially trying to make a clarinet sound, I decided to try using a noise oscillator to experiment with filters, to listen for what happens to the overtones. When I left the building after that, I could identify the different layers of noise from various buildings and machines on campus. IT SOUNDED LIKE A SYMPHONY. That was one of my biggest learning experiences so far, and it came from taking a detour from what I had set out to do. That moment when I realized how much I learned from a detour, was when I realized how silly I’ve been for worrying about following my plan. Plans shouldn’t detract from the learning that happens along the way.

The fact is, I don’t have time to cover everything I need to cover, internalize it, and present my findings in a neat little package. So, I’m going to treat this blog as a documentation of my learning, rather than a perfectly organized presentation of topics. There are tons of articles of wonderfully organized teachings of topics, and before I can add to those, I have many things to learn. Perhaps one day, I’ll be able to assemble my ideas about electronic music into some nicely organized doctoral thesis, but for now, I just need to learn as much as possible. So far, this course is teaching me more about learning it is about anything I’m trying to learn, and I think that’s pretty cool!

I could muse over ideas about learning for hours, but I think I’ve said most of what’s been on my mind, so let’s jump into the little bit I initially set out to present and get it over with so I can move on to learning and experimenting with the next section I’m going to cover.

A vaguely structured approach

I got fairly behind in my schedule that I had initially envisioned, due to life, learning, and finding balance. In order to push through, I decided to combine two of my sections into one: Sound and Synthesis Fundamentals, and Synthesis Concepts. Sound and Synthesis Fundamentals is a section where I’m supposed to study acoustic sounds via oscilloscope, and make an attempt at recreating those sounds, and present my findings via comparison. That section was meant to reinforce the idea that synthesis is something different from acoustic instruments, and they should be seen as separate, not replacements for each other. With so many sonic possibilities, why replicate sounds that can already be made by existing instruments? Synthesis Concepts was meant to cover subtractive synthesis, FM synthesis, and granular, wavetable synthesis.

I learn concepts best when I have a practical application, so I set out to study these concepts by using them to create a clarinet sound after studying recordings of clarinetists via oscilloscope. I thought I would package up all my findings in one tidy blog post, but that idea wasn’t realistic, so I’m going to post about each synthesis concept separately, and I will not restrict myself to replicating a clarinet sound with the next two posts, because I think I got what I need from that exercise with this experiment.

Studying the sound

I routed the audio from a few recordings through an oscilloscope to study what clarinet sounds look like. I recorded the oscilloscope with my phone, and since I can’t upload videos here unless I upgrade to premium, here are some images from that video:

I could have uploaded the video to some other platform and linked to it, but I think these screenshots are enough for the purpose of this blog.

As you can see, the sound isn’t exactly consistent due to the colouristic possibilities within the clarinet sound, so I knew that I would have to arbitrarily choose which clarinet sound to synthesize, and I chose to make something like the bottom left corner picture.

I found some sources to learn about subtractive synthesis:

• https://theproaudiofiles.com/sound-synthesis-basics/
• http://synthesizeracademy.com/subtractive-synthesis/
• https://documentation.apple.com/en/logicexpress/instruments/index.html#chapter=A%26section=3%26hash=apple_ref:doc:uid:TempBookID-ReplacedWhenAssociatingWithMessierRevision-43982SYN_SC_0908-SW1

And I used the information from these to carve out a sound on the Roland GAIA SH-01 that could look like a clarinet sound.

Synthesizing the sound

I started with a square wave, and I wanted to make it darker and more focused, so I used a low-pass filter. I messed around with the levels of the cutoff and resonance until I found something that looked like the sound wave I was trying to replicate. I got distracted many times by the different sounds I could make, but eventually I settled on something, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to make a sound that satisfies my clarinetist ears. I couldn’t figure out exactly what was missing, but the closest explanation that came to mind was the intensity and direction that I’ve always been taught to strive for in my sound. Whether it’s my lack of experience, or the inherent limitations of synthesis, I was incapable of creating a sound that even comes close to what my clarinetist ears look for–which might be the reason it’s taken me a week to put this post together.

I forgot to get pictures of the oscilloscope, but I’ll get those when I’m in my lab this week.

And here they are:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I did get this recording, since I was using Stravinsky’s Three Pieces as a way to study clarinet sound waves, I decided I would make an attempt at playing the opening of that with my robotic clarinet-ish sound:

(Hey look! Embedding things instead of linking to them. Making progress…blogress?)

In attempting this, I also learned that it is much easier to play this piece on a clarinet than on a keyboard, given the leaps involved.

General thoughts about this exercise

I definitely learned a lot. Most of what I learned was not directly related to my assignment, but I still learned it through this assignment, and that added value to the experience. I definitely want to just get this posted so I can move on though; I have so much to do, and this is only the beginning!

Next up: exploring FM synthesis via FM8, which will probably result in a shorter post than this one simply for practicality of getting through this course. I can explore topics in greater detail when I don’t have a time limit, but I’d like to avoid running this into the school year, since that will be stressful enough as it is.

Composition Brain Goop #3

General Thoughts

Time for another section! As you can see by the title, I’ve done two of these before, and this is yet another continuation from where I left off in Composition Brain Goop #2. I hope to have the fourth one out soon as well, because I have it in my head, it’s just a matter of expanding it and putting it to words. I know my ideas will change slightly as I learn more about what I can and can’t accomplish with the equipment, knowledge, and time at my disposal, my ideas with shift and I will have to make some compromises, but I need a base to start from, so I need to get my ideas out of my head and examine them so I can move on. That said, let’s dive into my idea for the third section of this piece!

After doing something bold and shocking in the first section (kind of like a fanfare that announces the arrival of something), and transitioning into something familiar and folk-like that incorporates soundscapes as background accompaniment in the second section (like a soothing second movement to contrast the chaos of the first), we will move onto a more ethereal third section with the background being like an inner soundscape of emotions as we reflect inward. The third section will be less stable than the folk-like section, but more stable than the first section.

In terms of creating the sounds for this section, I want them to sound shimmery and distant. I want harmonies to frame the lyrics, and I don’t know if they will be pre-rendered harmonies, or if I’ll find a way to detect the pitches of the vocalist and generate harmonies on the fly either by using a virtual instrument or just using effects on the input of the mic and crafting a vocal line that can harmonize itself nicely via reverb or delay or something.

The Goopiest Section so Far

If you didn’t read the first Composition Brain Goop post, you totally should go read it right now, otherwise, here’s a general overview of how I’ll be notating my piece below for brainstorming and documenting my process/progress:

Lyrics will be notated in regular text. Comments will be in brackets. Electronic idea descriptions will be italicized. Electronic trigger actions will be bold – R for tilting the head right, L for tilting the head left, F for tilting the head forward, and B for tilting the head back. After each tilt, it is assumed that the head be brought back to center.

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[Here’s the last bit of the second section and the transition into the third, just to get us situated.]

And romanticized prose about sailing. [This last line with gusto! Like a punchline that acknowledges the cheesiness of everything that just happened.]

B Line up the trigger with ‘man’ in ‘romanticized’ to schedule the drum to end in 4 measures. Keep the backwards tilt natural, coming back to center by ‘sailing’ to emphasize the last word of this section. The end of the drum triggers another transitional morphing section in the oceany water sounds to a fuzzy kind of white noise (which sounds very similar to rain) to switch into shimmery ethereal spacey sounds meant to be something like a soundscape of the mind.

[In this section, the sensor will be extra sensitive to shape the soundscape, like brushing a feather across a still pond: just to add occasional ripples to catch the light and shimmer differently.]

With so many possibilities, how can I just sing about sailing?

So much pain in the world to heal…

So much division…

Cracking my world to pieces…

B Looking up, as if to some higher power, this time don’t go back to center right away, just look up and let the sound surround you for a while. A sound will emerge from the soundscape, it will probably be a theremin, because they imitate humming really well, and it will do the first fragment of Garnet’s motif from Steven Universe: C G F Bb G. Then as it does the second fragment, return the head to center position: C G F Eb C. Join in for the closing fragment singing ‘ah’s: C G F Bb C, and fade out. The electronics will play two cycles of a four-chord progression in 8th notes in 6/8 time. Enter on the third note of the last chord of the second progression.

[One pitch per syllable. I’m leaving rhythm out of this post for now.]

We’ll fill up the cracks, [C G F Eb C]

And make the world whole, [C G F Eb Bb]

Fill the spa-ces in-be-tween. [Bb Bb G Ab G Eb F]

We’ll fill up the cracks, [C G F Eb C]

And make the world whole, [C G F Eb Bb]

Fill the spa-ces in-be-tween. [Bb Bb G Ab G Eb F]

 

With lo-o-ove [Eb Eb D C]

Fill it with lo-o-o-o- [F Eb D Eb D C]

o-o-o-o-ove. [C G F Bb G] [This has a meter change, and the electronics have been looping the same chord progression through this, so once it does so many loops, it will not only switch meter, but it will add more echo-y reverb goodness to the the vocals to make this bit sound super spacey with a fade-out like we’re zooming out on a scene.]

B Looking up again, as if to some higher power as sounds shift and morph into the next section.

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I should have the next section up within a week! Then I can really get into things and at least properly notate the vocals to schedule a workshop session with my vocalist to make sure the range and everything is good for her! I’m still learning a lot about the electronic side of things, so those details will be added much later.

Have a lovely day, and choose kindness!

 

Playing with Cubase

I finally started recording things! Cubase is a little intimidating, and I couldn’t figure out how to get it to work with external instruments the night that I was determined to record, so I just chose and instrument from Reaktor, and used a USB keyboard to play it into Cubase.

I played the chord progression twice and just copy/pasted it a few times so I could hear it while recording a second track for the melody. Even the simple act of copying and pasting a chord progression was harder than I thought it would be, because the way we play something smoothly involves a slight overlap, which means that, when pasting stuff in, you need to put it in slightly before the end of the last note. If I could have gotten the built-in metronome to play without being added to the track, then I would have done that, but this was late at night, and I didn’t look into it. Looking back, I definitely could have used the metronome and looked at the details of the track to see if it was actually in it, but I had a lot of new things to take in, so I wasn’t thinking clearly.

I had been messing around with making variations of Garnet’s motif from Steven Universe–the original motif can be heard at the end of Something Entirely New, and in the refrain of Stronger Than You. I plan to use this in one of the sections of my current composition, so I wanted to see what I could do with it in terms of chord progressions and embellishments without taking away from the beautiful simplicity of the motif and it’s representation of love. As it turns out, being someone with years of piano experience, and almost no virtual instrument experience, it’s much easier to improvise on piano than it is to enter one track at a time using a virtual instrument. That being said, it was really fun to put this together, even though it’s super simple… It’s a start!

I plan to put up one more recording this week, unless something crazy comes up, so stay tuned!

You can listen to my recording on SoundCloud if you want. 🙂

Consume art. Process art. Create art. Repeat.

Excited Rambling, and Seeds of Ideas

Since all of this is so new to me, it’s a bit slow to start; I need to take time to break-in some new shoes before training for my first marathon. (The training being the learning of all the things, and the final composition being the marathon where I apply all the things as best I can, and then celebrate finishing the marathon no matter what place I finish because it’s my first one.) I need to take time to lay a solid foundation, because building things on a rushed foundations means that every time a new thing is added, the foundation under it needs to be reinforced to take the extra strain, and once I start building I want to be able to rely on my foundation handling almost anything I build on it. I need to learn the words before I can tell the story. I need to establish the axioms before I can write my proofs. I need to… stop layering analogies…

I just got really excited and had to write something here tonight because I started brainstorming some deadline goals, and that made everything feel a lot more tangible and exciting (and a tiny bit stressful, which, I suppose, is a good motivator). I treat these posts as a free-writing/brainstorming/idea-dump kind of exercise to somehow sort through what’s in my head since these posts are not specifically associated with any assigned section of work. These brainstorming sessions allow me to explore my thoughts, and they are something to which I can point to say “I am doing things, it just takes a while to step into something entirely new.”

My basic understanding of sound synthesis as of right now (after just playing with equipment and doing almost no research):

1. We start with a basic wave form: curve, triangle, or square.
2. We put that basic wave through a filter that affects the sound in a spacial kind of way. (I can’t think of a clearer way to say that right now, but you’ll get what I mean when you see the next step.)
3. We put that filtered wave through a filter that affects the sound through time.
4. We can layer different sounds together, and I guess I would call them compound sounds? (Ex: adding noise to a sound doesn’t seem to change the sound; it just adds a layer over it like frost on a window. Whereas a filter is more responsive to the underlying sound, like how a filter to enhance the colours in a picture will work differently depending on which colours are in said picture.)
5. Then we can do general adjustments when applying the sound(s), like changing the average* volume, pitch, and duration.

*I say ‘average’ because all three of these aspects can vary within the sound construction as well.

That helped to sort out my thoughts a bit, and now it’s time to end these late night ramblings in favor of sleep.

Remember: you are the masterpiece that requires most of your energy; every task before you is just a tool to shape you, and none of the tools come with instructions, so experiment and explore your options!

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Exciting side note (bottom note? [insert ‘note’ pun of choice here])

This doodle will eventually become my logo when I make time to make a good copy! It has a rainbow sound wave in the shape of my initials (electro), with eighth-notes (acoustic) that form a swing (playground) for a person to ponder anything and everything! I also decided to embellish the seat of the swing with some piano keys for synthesizers. I really love how it all came together! (My best doodles always seem to come from Math classes… I’m not a slacker, it’s just really hard to pay attention to Intro to Stats on a summer evening after working all day…)