Week 4: Programmability and Sound Design
I’ve been deathly ill this weekend, but doing this reading was a highlight. My entire Saturday night morphed into a Paul Lansky jam out, drinking bone broth under a heated blanket and imagining learning how to tell my own narrative. Long stretches of monotonous atmospheric silence, interjected with random bursts of emotional music, matching the tone of the conversations I overhear from my room, people on the path underneath my window in Toyon come in so crystal clear, I’ve heard dissonant snippets of gossip, laughter, and tearful breakups. The ability to turn everyday noises into harmonizable sounds for musical arrangements with comb filters is such an exciting concept! I’d like to run voices through these filters and have a bunch of people talking, to crescendo into a peaceful buzz that fades off, like a zen-humanoid version of the THX deep note. I was also reminded of one of my favorite childhood movies, August Rush, and how the main character heard the traffic noises around him as a symphony orchestra. I started to imagine I was hearing everything as a musical piece too, stomping or tiptoeing down the stairs at school to whatever melody was playing in my head from the people moving from class to class.
Just knowing the tools and techniques that already exist offers constraints, which can inspire creativity in brainstorming how to maximize their potential usage for your message. By placing more emphasis on the medium, your message can shine through more clearly, allowing the medium to fade into the background. Computers and graphics are so ubiquitous in our daily media consumption that often the medium fades into the background effortlessly with computers, but I often forget that this is through sufficient skill on the creator’s part.
I’ve never really liked programming apart from the satisfaction of getting Psets done and feeling like I have some semblance of job security after school. Working on the audio visualizer, I started to understand how people find coding fun. When creating something you can call your own, playing, and making art you want to feel proud of and show others, I started becoming excited to sit back down at my laptop and make something visually compelling with the tools I had learned so far. The aesthetic possibilities of the smiley face were definitely co-evolving with the acquisition of new unity knowledge. I’m excited and pretty nervous about the sound design aspect, given I still know very little about music apart from listening to a bunch. It will be fun to play around some given the extension, as I’m still struggling to do the most basic rotations/transformations in unity XD. I will try to get some kind of punk atmospheric vibe. I’m considering modifying a sound, like the suggestion of stretching a yell to 20x its length, and making music surrounding that with some kind of emo message/narrative in mind. I’d only been thinking in terms of basic synthesis as that was my introduction to ChucK so far, but I’m excited to try out some of these techniques with the bit of time I have! There is much to master before Wednesday- I am determined so I can’t lose, but I certainly may run out of time. Brain fog is also setting in quite thoroughly :)