2007 - Sem2 - Week1 - CC1 - Modular Programming(1)

This program seems pretty cool. The only thing I can see myself having is patching things in any old way. I’m not really used to that (unless I make a mistake) as I’ve always been yelled at if I patch something wrong. I did patch things in ‘wrong’ but it didn’t do anything so I patched everything in a normal chain.
The ‘tune’ is fairly random. I played around with the 16 step sequencer and particle arpegiator and got some quirky notes happening. I put some low level distortion in via the Deconcrisseur and two band distortion plugs.
Overall my soundscape isn’t anything to write home about but I can see this program being a usefull application.

Soundscape
Bidule file

Haines, Christian. 2007. “CC1-Modular Programming(1)” Seminar presented at the University of Adelaide, 26th July.

Plogue Bidule. 2001-2007 Plogue Art et Technologie, Inc

2007 – Sem 2 – Week1 - Forum – Electronics, Instrument Building and Improvisation

Circuit Bending: the art of rumaging through bins to make ‘instruments’ from other people’s junk. Good Lord! After todays bombardment of buzzes, pops and zaps I can only imagine what the Ode to Headache Symphony No.1 will sound like in week 8. What can I say about the Victorian Synth? I don’t know, but I do know I was doing this exact same thing with speakers as a kid to bounce marbles off of. They’ve just put a name to it now. When you’re actually making noise yourself it is fun I guess, although it gets boring rather quickly, but from an audience perspective I found it completely boring. It takes no musical ability at all and just solidifies the old adage that computer geeks are trying to be musicians and producers. Once upon a time one could buy a computer and suddenly they’d rudely call themselves a Mastering Engineer. Now they can rumage through a bin and call themselves a musician or maybe even a Musical Instrument Engineer? Good grief. And judging by a few YouTube videos this really just seems to be a hobby for the unemployed to waste their waking hours on but that’s just my cynical opinion. ;)

Buzz Buzz Zap Bzzzztt

Haines, Christian. 2007. “Forum Workshop – Electronics, Instrument Building and Improvisation.” Seminar presented at the University of Adelaide, 26th July.

Whittington, Stephen. 2007. “Forum Workshop – Electronics, Instrument Building and Improvisation”. Forum presented at the University of Adelaide, 26th July.

Seb Tomczak. 2007. “Forum Workshop – Electronics, Instrument Building and Improvisation.” Seminar presented at the University of Adelaide, 26th July.

2007 - Sem2- Week 1 – AA1 – What is Sound Design?

Sound design, as we discussed in class, can cover a fair range of work from film work to toasters. A manufactured sound should have a purpose or function but does that sound faithfully reflect that function. The form of the sound may deliberately be non complimentary to the image or device that it will be attached to. Perhaps it would be acceptable for the latest version of Unreal Tournament to have a baby burp each time a gun is fired instead of a huge machine gun sound or perhaps each time your microwave sets of the annoying piezo ding it could instead say “Oi dickhead, get your crap out of this oven!!” Hmm, perhaps not.

I was going to jump right into talking about Ben Burtt but as far as film sound is concerned I couldn’t possibly have a blog on the subject without mentioning Jack Foley. So there you go. I mentioned him and so I don't go too far over the word count you'll have to look him up yourself.

The ‘lightsaber effect’ created by Ben Burtt for the 1977 film Star Wars is no doubt one of the most recognisable sound effect there is and people immediately recognise it and associate it with George Lucas’ epic saga. It has been sampled and used in a few other films since then, but people more often than not make a comment like “hey that’s a lightsaber noise.” The whole idea of the sound was to be unique while still sounding organic. Lucas apparently wanted to get away from the simple electronic sounds and effects of science fiction films of the time for his used universe. A lightsaber obviously doesn’t exist in the real world so Burtt was able to use artistic ideas to represent the form of the sound, but still kept a certain functional element to it by recording a doppler effect (which involved waving a microphone in front of a speaker while it played the buzz/humm noise) to create a sense of movement. For anyone interested in knowing anything further about the work of Ben Burtt, there is an excellent documentary on the DVD Star Wars Episode II – Attack of the Clones named “Films Are Not Released; They Escape.”

And while I’m in full nerd mode, a free cookie goes to the person who guesses what this is from.

Haines, Christian. 2007. “Audio Arts-What is Sound Design?” Seminar presented at the University of Adelaide, 24th July.

The Art of Foley. Philip Rodrigues Singer. “The Story of Jack Foley” http://www.marblehead.net/foley/jack.html (26th July 2007)

FilmSound.org. Sven E. Carlsson “Sound Design of Star Wars” http://www.filmsound.org/starwars/ (26th July 2007)

Week 15 – AA1 – Final Recording

I recorded a young three piece band named Unknown Truth. An eight hour recording session and everything got done. Apart from a little mishap with the routing of the headphone sends, everything went well. The recording itself went very smooth. Four takes were done and the final one was judged as having the best vibe. Only one quick drop in each was required for the guitar and the bass. The vocals were recorded in the live room. The guitar ended up being double tracked. Overall I’m pretty pleased with the recording, although I still feel I have a long way to go. The snare especially sounds flat and I probably should’ve used baffles more to tame the room sound. The band was extremely happy with everything so I am happy about that. They got to take a rough mix on CD home with them at the end of the session and got yelled at by some old man from Scott Theatre telling them to turn it down when they blared it in the parking lot. Ahh rock n roll.

The initial mix took around 15 hours. Much of this time was spent mucking about with the snare drum and the vocals. The snare doesn’t have any ‘crack’ to it and no amount of equalising, as I found, was going to help. The vocals (and the drums in general) have the room sound imprinted on the recording. Baffles around the back of the kit and around the vocalist would have helped. In the end I scrapped the first mix and started again with a fresh outlook. This time I used the room sound instead of fighting against it. This kind of thinking certainly helped and the mix went smoother the second time around and got it done in six hours.

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Finished Mix

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Preproduction

Recording

Production

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Fieldhouse, Steve. 2007. “Audio Arts 1.” All seminars presented at the University of Adelaide from Feb to June.

Digidesign. 1996-2007 Avid Technology, Inc All Rights Reserved.

Week 15 - CC1 - Final Composition

The idea for this came from a collection of sounds I had recorded a couple of years ago. The original sounds were recorded on analogue tape via a Marantz tape recorder using a RODE NT3. The sounds are scrapes recorded from a rusty metal louvre on a pig pen and a metal ashtray from a car being slid in and out. A small section from this collection of sounds are used in this composition. A section with as much sustain as posible was found. The longest ‘note’ was around 1 and a half seconds so a lot of time stretching was going to be done.

The piece itself is made from four tracks which represent a string quartet. Each track comprises of small sections of recorded scrapes pitch shifted to create musical notes. A short piece was written in Bm. This was used as the template for the scrapes. I think the idea of sounds of nature replacing traditional orchestral sounds has potential although this piece didn’t really represent it well. With more work and time I’m sure this could get to a level that I would find acceptable.

This piece could easily have been put together via MIDI, but it would have had a different result. If the sound was triggered by a sampler, the sounds would no doubt have artifacts from being pitch shifted and also the side effect of automatically getting the tempo of each sample altered up or down depending on the keyboard note. Having full control by choosing the sound which most closely resembles a particular note gives much better results although doing it that way is a very time consuming method.

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Feast your ears!!

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Preproduction

Program Note

Analysis

Score

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Haines, Christian. 2007. “Creative Computing.” Seminars presented at the University of Adelaide between Feb and June 2007.

Carrol, Mark. 2007. "Perspectives in Music Technology 1A." Seminar presented at the University of Adelaide, Week 7.

Digidesign. 1996-2007 Avid Technology, Inc All Rights Reserved.

Week 12 - Forum - Composition and Improvisation

If a musical piece has only chords written and no melody, does adding a random melody ‘on the fly’ during a performance constitute improvisation? Maybe. I thought so before this forum but now I realise it could be considered a composition since a framework, ie the chords, were already in place. I still like to think the idea of randomness is separate from improvisation. Certainly related, but separate nonetheless. This is all an interesting paradox, but one my brain can do without at the moment. My idea of improvisation is being given a task to do and making it happen with whatever limited means are available at that given time. That could mean to play a musical piece without any sheet music, to record a performance with limited equipment or to break out of prison with no more than a paper clip and a drinking straw.

Whittington, Stephen. 2007. Forum Workshop “Composition and Improvisation”. Forum presented at the University of Adelaide, 31th May.

Harris, David. 2007. Forum Workshop “Composition and Improvisation”. Forum presented at the University of Adelaide, 31th May.

Week 12 - CC1

Here's the score for my major assignment. It's pretty simple. The different colours represent different "instruments" while the durations are represented by the length of the lines.

Through our tutorials with Mark Carrol I was slightly confused about the definition of music concrete. As far as I can tell music concrete is basically music not made from traditional instruments. Natural ‘worldly’ sounds are used to create music instead, but at the same time although there is usually a lot of tape editing and looping involved these sounds are kept natural. That is my dillema. I am going to use some noises I recorded, but I won’t be keeping them entirely natural. I’ll be pitch shifting and stretching the sounds to create a bizarre string quartet.

I will be doing this piece entirely in Pro Tools using the Speed plugin although the original sounds were recorded on a Marantz CP230 with a Rode NT3. The score uses zig zag lines to illustrate the durations of the notes and to represent the movement and duration of the sounds. This zig zag score could be used for a number of different sound sources. One that comes to mind is hack sawing four metal tubes of different lengths and widths. Hmm, I think I'll do just that over the holidays...
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Haines, Christian. 2007. “Creative Computing.” Seminar presented at the University of Adelaide, 31st May.