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Filter & Grain Delay

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Track details for final presentation

Top screenshot: Each recording of feedback.

Bottom screenshot: Triggers for the melody samples.

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“dizzy feedback” Final Explanation

For my final, I recorded myself and 2 friends (Jimmy and Camm) using touch feedback on a courter inch into Ableton, and then sampled and looped the feedback into a pluck like synth would.

I then had each person (myself included) write a melody in D# one after the other.

Next, like my last final, I exported the entire melody and ran that back into a sampler and had it trigger the way you would a pluck synth. I subsequently had everyone then place notes anywhere on the score so long as they were in 5ths of each other, to somewhat maintain the initial tonality of their melodies.

After that, I set a reactive panning effect on each of the 3 tracks to somewhat randomly spike each track left or right when they reached a certain volume threshold.

Since each sampler had a release set to almost the entirety of the exported melody, I wanted to see how dizzy the track could get while still technically maintaining its initial tonality. I focused this track on the collaborative effort, since each person approached the melody writing and trigger placing differently.

The final process I added was a random filter gate and grain delay. The filter gate randomly shoves the track through any random resonant frequency within the parameters I entered when the volume hits a certain level. I stacked a grain delay on top with similar trigger requirements on top to provide another layer of confusion. The grain delay slowly dissipates the grain to slowly increase the dizziness of the piece. I slowly mixed these effects in until the audio was coming completely wet through the grain delay, this is what causes the “accelerating” noise at the beginning.

I find that this is a more successful piece of sound art due to the contrast it gives to the initial melodies. Standing alone, each track would be a pretty composition, but when combined and randomized it creates a confusing piece of sound art. Even with all of these layers and pitch processes, the track still technically maintains its original intonation believe it or not. I also think it is strong due to the fact that I didn’t use any conventional sound art tools to create these sound (i.e. Max patches, etc), strictly musical production plugins. The aspect that it was created using human conducting is to be noted as well, as it’s another aspect that would not be perceived unless explained.

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Final Proposal

Not decided yet, but I want to try and create a melodic piece of art that is created entirely with the feedback created when touching my finger to a quarter inch running into my interface.

Going to try and make it even more dizzying than the midterm.

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Exercise #11

These industrial bands are drawing on steampunk aesthetics and using noise to explain their subjugation and the imperialist power present at the time. Wolf Eyes is a perfect example of the noise overpowering the listener, a way of fighting back against the institution.

Nowadays with bands like Lightning Bolt and Black Dice, the noise doesn’t seem to overpower the people in the same way, but rather meant to empower the people. Another example of this is with minor threat and other visceral sounding bands that have extreme left politics. 

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Doon Kanda (Jesse Kanda) - Luna

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Select 2018 “Good Room Brooklyn” posters by Braulio Amado.

Braulio is a good friend of mine, and I wanted to share a few of my favorite posters he’s done for Good Room over the last year. I personally find it interesting that the creative accessibility of his posters have given many nights a flair that attracted new clubgoers that may not have previously attended.

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Exercise #10 sculpture graphic

This graphic focuses on the phase & stereo image of a track. It would be fun to see in sculpture form.

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Exercise #10 Writing

Elias Hanzer is a graphic designer and type designer. Recently they created an interactive type design tool called “Phase”, which utilizes variable typefaces designed in collaboration with Dinamo Type. These variable typefaces react to sound input into your computers microphone or sound card, making them completely unique to each user.

This is an awesome overlap of two of my main interests - graphic design and audio technology. However, the design seems to fall short since the only thing that seems to noticeably affect the font is the amplitude of the sound input into your computer. It would be interesting to see how the way words were said into the computer effect the type, instead of amplitude.

Phase website: https://www.eliashanzer.com/phase/

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Samples

Bjork

Kanye West

Myself

Archy Marshall

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Exercise #9

Phonography feels to me more like a breach of privacy than a form of theft. It does seem intrinsically “original” however, since the recordings are completely new in the sense that they are typically field recordings of live conversations and other real-time events. 

As a musician who regularly has their compositions illegally sampled and interpolated by other producers, I’m stiffly on the side of anti-sampling. So often artists who consider their work “music” use sampling as a shortcut due to their lack of talent or ability to compose music on their own. I see this as a form of weakness and definitely look down on it. That being said, I only feel that way about basic sampling - which seems to be most sampling these days. However, when an artist takes a sample and processes it such that it is entirely unrecognizable when compared to the original source - then I see that as a form of productive recycling (an agreement between the interpolator and the interpolated still needs to be reached, either way.) I have a hard time denouncing Oswald’s stance on sampling via Plunderphones, since it seems that the mentality behind that is not with the intention of claiming ownership over said samples, which I suppose would be an example of productive recycling in a different sense.

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What is Sound Art? What does a Sound Artist Do?

Sound art holds a simple description in my mind. Like visual art, if someone tells me their audio is to be taken as “Sound Art”, then I will respect that. However, if I don’t have the luxury of asking the artist/composer what to consider their audio, I would take a few things into consideration before slapping a title on their piece. 

I often find that when people create sound that is intentionally left of center in a musical scope, they would either call it “experimental” or just refer to it as sound art. If something, by my prejudices, sound left of center enough to present as sound art or experimental music, then I would proceed unto the next consideration.

It’s helpful to look at how the piece was put out into the world. If it’s put out in a single/album format, it’s probably going to be considered music by the artist more often than not. If the music only appears as a live performance in video format, and it fits the prior criteria of sounding left of center, then it is probably going to be considered sound art.

After considering these two things, I would then take into consideration — what does the artist seem to do? I would say a composer/musician exists to write music, to express through what they define as music, and a sound artist existing to express through what they consider sound art. A sound artist, similarly to a musician, probably wishes to innovate in their field, or to re-perform  a piece by another sound-artist. The comparison between music and sound art can also be made between music and cooking - all that matters is what the artist/performer/composer considers themselves to be doing.

All that being said, I’m not really into defining people’s crafts when it comes to art.

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Process picture of my Ableton file + “Delicate” graphic score for interpretation.

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Midterm Essay/Explanation

My piece of sound art for my midterm is called “Delicate”. I created this piece in hopes of making something stimulating as well as calming to listen to, but not in a musical context. My materials for this piece of sound art are my computer, Ableton, and a 12 sided die.

First, I wrote 3 melodies in Ableton using basic sine waves and some EQing to soften them up a bit. Next, I exported each melody as a 10-second WAV sample. I panned one sample right, one left, and kept one mono. After importing the melodies into a new Ableton file I loaded each synth into different samplers with the sample release set to 10 seconds so the sample will play all the way through when activated.

To begin the notation for this piece, I follow the (very interpretive) graphic score for this piece. I rolled the 12 sided die a set amount of times for each of the 3 melody samples. Every time I roll a 7, I have the sampler play the loop a 7th down. Every time I roll a 12, I have the sampler play the loop an octave down. To have each melody generating from a separately “random” chance-operation, I rolled a different amount for each track: 25 times for the mono sample, 30 for the right track, and 40 for the left track. Separately, I have the entire track running through a virtual delay pedal, and every time I rolled the same number twice in a row I would turn the delay up.

The piece is inspired by Ryuichi Sakamoto’s “ZURE”. This is one of my favorite compositions from Sakamoto, and it felt like it really hit a nice middle ground between sound art and musical sound. I really enjoyed the simplistic repetition he created, and I wanted to create something of a similar piece myself. In “ZURE”, Sakamoto used a repeating chord spread across the stereo image to give his piece character — in Delicate I used repeating melodies. My inspiration for the chance operations was basic, yet drawn from the experiments of John Cage in some of his aleatoric works.

“Delicate” turned out better than I expected granted it was an experiment. I was worried it would sound too musical, but I find that the randomized chaos of the operation created something more compelling as an art piece.

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Midterm Audio

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My Fluxus performance featuring:

Aidan Peterson: Sequencing & synthesizer, Finger Piano, Guitar, Playing Gameboy, Cooking.

David Zaiman: cooking

Bridget Lai: doing homework