I got a Launchkey and I need to go to bed, but the Launchkey came in the mail today and I got to play around a bit and I made a thing!! 😀 I could not abstain from taking a couple minutes to at least document this here, since it is very much part of my journey into the world of electronic music.
Now, goodnight! I hope I’ll have regular updates on my Launchkey adventures! ^_^
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.
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.
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!!
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.
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.
It is MUCH harder to finish up this project with all my other classes happening now, but here’s a thing I made today! One of the little exercises I had to do is to control an external instrument via a Digital Audio Workstation. I chose the GAIA as my external instrument and had some fun:
Still so much to do, but now I have one less thing to do!
I’ve decided on using Ableton Live for my composition project, so today I played around with it to get familiar with the software and working with a launch pad. It was really helpful to just mess around with the purpose of making something, but not having to make something amazing, just … something. That something ended up being Pink Panther, because reasons. It was a fun time.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Electroacoustic Playground 