Henry Reed's Blog

CC - Minor Project

2006-11-24T03:33:00.000-08:00

Hi all,

Unfortunately I have not got my CC piece as an MP4 with me here in South Africa! It's still on my hard disk in good old Adelaide. So are my program note and analysis! However, the required files were in my CC submission on the server... I hope they find their way to assessment.

Best regards, Henry.

AA - Major Project - Process

2006-11-24T03:26:00.000-08:00

Here is a summary of the process I following in creating the soundtrack for the animated short film, "A Perfect Hit".

Collaboration. The project began with a series of meetings with the animator, Zhou. At the first meeting I was presented with a storyboard (included in deliverables), which showed portraits of the characters and the main storyline. The next few meetings established the fact that a script would be needed for the comedy sketch, which I then wrote and approved with Zhou. By this time some of the fighting animation was being completed so I got to experiment with trialling some sound effects to fit the action.

Dialogue. As the most important element for communicating the story, the dialogue was the next task. With the script approved, I persuaded a friend and actor, Brendan Blue, to provide the voices for the animation. The dialogue was recorded in the Dead Room. As Brendan was doing the voices for the Student and Master characters, we recorded a separate series of takes for each role. During the takes, I would play the part of the other character for Brendan over the headphones, to make it easier for him to get into character. The best takes were then cut and combined into one "super take" for each character. Some of the dialogue was also cut or changed, and some ad-lib speech that had not been scripted was funny enough to be worthy of inclusion.

Sound Effects. At the same time as the script was being written, I was also sourcing the many sound effects I would need for all the martial arts body impacts, and for other key moments in the story. I was still waiting on animation to put these effects to however. By the time the dialogue was recorded, there was enough fighting animation ready to do a first run at selecting and placing effects. I firstly selected and placed the punches, kicks, whooshes (of dodging a punch) and falls, which have to be frame-accurate. I then found and inserted non-diegetic effects like the Chinese gong sound and some other sounds heard in the "sound montage" section where the screen fades to black (indicating the passing of time).

Atmoses. The story begins in the middle of the morning, outdoors, by the Shaolin Temple (which is in the Chinese countryside). As such, I selected an outdoor countryside atmosphere with plenty of birdsong. When the scene changes to the temple interior, I modified this atmosphere by cutting the high frequencies with EQ and adding some "room tone" to give the impression of being indoors. Later on, a period of time passes and the last few scenes take place in the early evening, when it has become much colder. For these scenes I used the sound of a chill wind, along with some night atmosphere (with the sound of crickets, and so on).

Music. I was lucky to source some excellent Chinese music from our instructor Ashley, as it is a distinctive style that would have been difficult to recreate. The "traditional Chinese" theme was placed during the fight scenes. Another quiet and tense piece with some great percussion sounds was placed underneath the "temple interior" scene, where we are first introduced to the Master. All that remained was some music for the opening scene, which sets the scene by panning around the exterior of a model of the Shaolin Monastery. I played the flute melody using one of the software instruments in the GarageBand program.

Foley. My friend Brendan stoically agreed to come back in and record the foley for the characters he had voiced. To record the sound of footsteps on the monastery courtyard, I used a cardboard tray filled with kitty litter placed next to a Neumann U-87 microphone (as the shotgun mike was not available). The Neumann was set to the highly directional figure-8 polar pattern to pick up Brendan's footsteps and scrapes. With the video patched into the EMU space, Brendan could watch the image on the screen while performing the character's movements. We then relocated to the Dead Room to record a "rustle track" to simulate the clothing rustles of the characters.

Mixing. After the animation was delivered to me by Zhou, I made a "director's cut" for sound using the program iMovie. I rearranged the order of some scenes according to the script, and extended or reduced the length of some scenes in order to fit the recorded dialogue. The final visuals could then be loaded into Pro Tools for the mix. The first job was to add some reverb to the vocals in the outdoor setting. I then pitch shifted the Master's voice down and the Student's voice up to make the characters sound different (as they were originally the same person's voice). The dialogue was then fairly extensively re-cut to fit the new scene order and timings. Items such as the SFX were also fine-tuned, and the final position of all the material was set in place.

I then recorded volume automation for the tracks. The tracks were then bussed into separate 5.1 faders for each of the five stems (Dialogue, Foley, FX, Atmoses and Music). Tracks such as the dialogue, foley and diegetic SFX were panned front-centre, while the music and atmoses were panned to the centre of the 5.1 mix. After a final level and automation check, the final mix was bounced to 6 mono audio files. Another "summed mono" bounce was then performed for the TV and Web mixes.

Watch this space for the web friendly movie file! I'm going to have to cut a bit off the end, as BlogUpload only allows 8MB files and mine is 8.2MB =\

AA - Sound Script

2006-11-24T03:09:00.000-08:00

The objective of this exercise was to write a 30-60s "sound script" for a film. The criteria required footsteps on at least two different surfaces, an indoors and outdoors scene, and the dialogue "What the hell's going on?!" Following is my plot synopsis, and a link to an Excel worksheet containing the scene by scene analysis.

Synopsis

Two children are having a competition to see who can ride a bike down a steep hill and skid to a stop closest to the river bank. They are creeping out of the house to do this stunt in the early morning, hence not a word is spoken. The children walk out of their house and down the gravel driveway (first footstep type). The challenger wheels his bike up the hill (tick-tick of bicycle gears) while the current champion walks down the muddy side of the river bank and marks his best skid position.

The challenger reaches the top of the hill and stops, taking a deep breath. He goes for it. The whirring of bicycle gears ticking at high speed is heard. He pedals hard, trying to get up as much speed as possible. At the last minute, he brakes – but the back brakes come loose (small noise) and the front brakes lock the front wheel. The challenger turns head over heels and literally flies 10m out into the centre of the river, landing with a huge splash!

The splash disturbs many waterfowl sitting on the river and there is a huge ruckus. It is enough to wake the champion’s parents, who are sleeping in the house quite close to the river. Cuts to interior of the bedroom. A man’s angry voice booms into the early morning air: “What the hell’s going on?!”

CC - Week 1 - Clocks and Scheduling

2006-09-12T23:44:00.000-07:00

The Description

I created a program using scheduling with three sound sources. All three use a "string" SynthDef. Sound sources 1 and 2 are gradually detuned and panned left and right; the one is detuned down and panned right, the other is detuned up and panned left. The parameter changes occur at different rates due to the different clocks being used. The 3rd sound source is panned dead centre but has its amplitude modulated by values that are scheduled by a similar system.

The Code


(
a = Array.series(100,0,0.01);
b = a.mirror1;
c = Array.series(100,-1,0.01);
d = c.mirror1;


//Strings 1: Centre

~r1 = Routine({
 var count = 0,
 ampNow,
 str = Synth("cfstring2");

 while( { true }, {
  ampNow = b.wrapAt(count) / 2;
  //postln("Centre amp is " ++ ampNow);
  str.set(\amp, ampNow);
  ampNow.yield;

  count = count + 1;
 });
});



//Strings 2: Panning left to centre

~r2 = Routine({

 var
  initFreq = 360,
  count = 0,
  str = Synth("cfstring2");
  
 str.set(\amp, 0.2);
 
 while( { true }, {
  //postln("The count is " ++ count);
  str.set(\pan, d.wrapAt(count));
  str.set(\freq, initFreq + (50 * d.wrapAt(count)));
  
  count = count + 1;
  d.wrapAt(count).yield;
 });
  
});

//Strings 3: Panning Centre to Right
~r3 = Routine({
 var
  initFreq = 360,
  count = 0,
  str = Synth("cfstring2");
  
  str.set(\amp, 0.2);
 
 while( { true }, {
  //postln("The count is " ++ count);
  str.set(\pan, b.wrapAt(count));
  str.set(\freq, initFreq + (50 * b.wrapAt(count)));
  
  count = count + 1;
  b.wrapAt(count).yield;
 });
  
})
)

SCHEDULING
(
~r1.reset;
SystemClock.sched(0.0, {
 ~r1.next;
 0.13
});


~r2.reset;
SystemClock.sched(0.0, {
 //~r1.next;
 //~r2.next;
 ~r2.next;
 0.11
});

~r3.reset;
SystemClock.sched(0.0, {
 ~r3.next;
 0.17
});
)

The Outcome
Very smooth.

CC - Week 5 - MIDI Input

2006-09-06T00:56:00.000-07:00

A simple program that filters NoteOn events and selectively executes a function (in this case, to print the note port, channel, note number and velocity).


MIDIClient.init //Initialise MIDI services, defaults to one device only
//other commands
MIDIClient.restart
MIDIClient.stop
MIDIClient.prList  //print a list of system IDs

MIDIIn.connect; //start listening to MIDI events on 1 port MIDI interface
//These can't be dynamically allocated - use the MIDIResponder class
MIDIIn.noteOn = { |port, chan, note, vel| [port, chan, note, vel].postln }; 
MIDIIn.noteOn = nil;  // stop responding


//attach a dynamic handler to NoteOn events
n = NoteOnResponder({ 
 arg src, chan, num, vel;
 [src, chan, num, vel].postln
});

n.remove;  //remove the handler

//handler that only responds to even value notes of velocity greater than 50
//use this technique to filter keyboard events, achieve velocity splits etc.
(
o = NoteOnResponder({ |src, chan, num, vel| [src, chan, num, vel].postln }, 
 nil, 
 nil, 
 (0, 2..126),  // could also be { |num| num.even } or _.even
 { |vel| vel > 50 }
);
)
o.remove

//stop listening to MIDI events
MIDIIn.disconnect;

//Quick start for 2 or more ports:
(
 var inPorts = 12;
 var outPorts = 2;
 MIDIClient.init(inPorts,outPorts); // explicitly initialise the client
 inPorts.do({ arg i; 
  MIDIIn.connect(i, MIDIClient.sources.at(i));
 });
)

Week 2 - AA - Analysis of 2 scenes from a feature film

2006-08-30T15:43:00.000-07:00

Scene: A shot or series of shots in a movie constituting a unit of continuous related action.

The film I chose to analyse for this exercise is the sci-fi movie Serenity, which is one of my favourites. Serenity is based on the TV series Firefly and has a large ensemble cast of 9 main characters; the opening sequence does a very good job of introducing both them and most of the background story in the space of only a few minutes. I chose this scene as the one "with dialogue". The second scene is the climax of the film; a dual fight scene. The first struggle is between the captain and the principal antagonist, the "Operative". The second fight takes place between the rest of the crew and the bloodthirsty "Reavers".

First Scene: With Dialogue
The Serenity graphic slowly fades in, and we see the graphic is actually painted on the side of the spaceship Serenity. The camera zooms out so that we can see the whole of the ship, apparently sitting motionless. It is quite a beautiful shot, totally C.G. No SFX can be heard as we are in the void of space. The music is gentle and quiet; "serene", I suppose.

The music begins to pick up in intensity, and as it builds to a climax, we see a warm glow surround the underside of the ship and a bang and rush of air as Serenity's retro rockets engage. We realise the ship is actually moving very fast and has just embarked on re-entry into a planet's atmosphere.

Dialogue: None (yet)
Music: Serenity theme (a lively "frontier" song)
SFX: Roaring sound of rockets, rushing air
Foley: None
Atmoses: None

The camera pans round the ship until we can see a figure standing in the cockpit. It is Mal, the principal protagonist. We then cut to inside the ship with Mal. There is an almighty bang and the sound of tearing metal as a small but important part of the ship breaks off.

Dialogue: Mal ("What was that? Was that the primary buffer panel? That sounded like the primary buffer panel!")
Music: Fades out
SFX: Bang of panel breaking off, followed by rattling of items in cockpit. Emergency klaxon sounding in the background. Also faint creaking sounds of stressed metal.
Foley: Mal's footsteps around the cockpit.
Atmoses: Faint roar of the craft's engines in the background. ("Aircraft ambience").

Mal (the captain) and the pilot converse. Mal addresses the crew through the intercom, so his voice is temporarily effected. He then moves out of the cockpit to find out what is happening.

Dialogue: Mal addressing the other crew members as he does the rounds.
Music: None
SFX: More creaking of stressed metal, shuddering sounds. Periodic loud bangs which are synchronised with shaking of the camera. The sounds of breaking glass and items falling to the floor. Sparks as Mal enters the engine room.
Foley: Metallic ringing of Mal's footsteps on the steel catwalks.
Atmoses: Same aircraft-type ambience

The sound effects above repeat in a similar fashion until Serenity eventually makes a safe landing.

Second Scene: Minimal Dialogue

Mal must get to the transmitter to send out a message to the known galaxy about the wrongdoings of the Alliance government. The Operative of the Alliance intends to stop him.

As Mal approaches the transmitter (which is on a floating platform in the middle of the space, and quite hard to reach), the Operative shoots him in the back with a stun pistol. Mal retaliates by outdrawing the Operative in a shootout. He then struggles to reach the transmitter while continuing to fight the Operative, who is hot on his heels.

While this is going on, the rest of the crew are fighting the Reavers amidst a flurry of gunshots, grunts, moans and roars.

Mal and the Operative
Dialogue: Limited dialogue (mostly grunts of combat and groans of pain); pithy jibes
Music: None
SFX: The full gamut of punches, kicks, cracks and keening, clanging sound of the Operative's sword
Foley: Thuds as the combatants fall to the floor or are thrown against railings, etc. Running, frantic footsteps.
Atmoses: There is an ominous, cyclic hum in the background; a reminder that the combatants are never far from the danger of falling into the power generator underneath the platform.

The Crew and the Reavers
Dialogue: Minimal dialogue from the main characters ("Go that way! Fall back!" etc.) accompanied by a thick texture of hair-raising roars and snarls from the Reavers.
Music: In contrast with the other fight scene, there is loud, tension building music present in these scenes. The only time the music goes quiet in these scenes is when Simon is shot. Then, everything goes silent as the camera focuses on his slow motion fall to ground.
SFX: A very thick sound texture of gunfire and the aforementioned snarls. In the pivotal moment where Simon is shot, the gunfire is still audible but sounds like it is coming from far away.
Foley: Crashes and bumps as the crew take cover from the onslaught.
Atmoses: More of an effect in general; it is a warehouse-type space so there is a ringing reverb on most of the FX.

Week 1 - AA - Sans Analysis

2006-08-29T20:56:00.000-07:00

The following is a scene by scene "Sans Analysis" of Vertov's Man With The Movie Camera.

0'00" Man walking through crowded street with movie camera on shoulder
Diegetic Sound / On Screen: Crowd ambience of a busy market street. Possibly footsteps of man carrying the camera (quite soft).
Diegetic Sound / Off Screen: Various sellers vocally advertising their wares.
Non-diegetic Sound: Light and up-tempo folk music.

0'04" Women talking / gossiping
Diegetic Sound / On Screen: The conversation of the two women (over their washing). Softer crowd noises to allow their dialogue to be heard.

0'09" Arrival of the Tram
Diegetic Sound / On Screen: Sounds of tram bells and noise of tram carriage on the rails. Bicycle bells near the end of scene.

0'16" Hanging the washing
Diegetic Sound / On Screen: Dialogue as the women on the left greets the other lady.

0'18" Man with eggs
Diegetic Sound / On Screen: Soft conversation of the two people in the background.
Diegetic Sound / Off Screen: Children's laughter.

0'20" Above the street
Diegetic Sound / On Screen: Crowd noises as from a distance. Sound of the wind in the trees. Distant car horns.
Non-diegetic Sound: Folk song draws to a close.

0'27" The shutters open
Diegetic Sound / On Screen: Creak as shutters open.
Diegetic Sound / Off Screen: Soft sound of teeth being brushed.

0'29" Teethbrush
Diegetic Sound / On Screen: Very loud and 'close' sound of teeth being brushed (no much reverb or ambience).

0'31" The Fence
Diegetic Sound / On Screen: Clang of metal as the grating is swung into position. Uncrowded street ambience.

0'35" Post the letter
Diegetic Sound / Off Screen: Footsteps as the lady walks towards frame.
Diegetic Sound / On Screen: Lady's footsteps in frame. Rustle of paper as the letter is posted.

0'40" Blind man
Diegetic Sound / On Screen: Sound of shutters being winched up as the man opens his store. Footsteps of the lady walking past.

0'46" Rotation
Diegetic Sound / On Screen: The same crowded street ambience. Squeak SFX as the man rotates the sign post.

0'48" The Voyage
Diegetic Sound / On Screen: Sound of shutters rolling up (much closer than in "Blind man").
Non-diegetic Sound: Slow, majestic music begins.

0'52" Slow Motion
Non-diegetic Sound: Slow, majestic music complements the period of slow motion. No other sound effects.

1'06" Wide fountain
Diegetic Sound / On Screen: Distant bubbling of the fountain over the music.

1'08" Close up fountain
Diegetic Sound / On Screen: The fountain bubbles close, loudly.

1'13" Woman in the window x3
Diegetic Sound / On Screen: Shutters opening (soft). Repeated in a slightly different way each time the shutters are opened in this series of dissolves.
Non-diegetic Sound: Slow, majestic music becomes sad and nostalgic. This woman seems sad, for some reason.

1'20" Sewing
Diegetic Sound / On Screen: Whirring of the sewing machine.
Diegetic Sound / Off Screen: Sound of woman singing.

1'24" More shutters
Diegetic Sound / On Screen: Shutter sound effect.

-End of excerpt-

Week 4: CC2 - SC - GUI

2006-08-26T00:23:00.000-07:00

Picture of the interface for controlling the granular synthesis patch:

In the "sonic outcome", I adjusted each of the sliders in turn and then at random to achieve some interesting sounds.

CC2 - SC - Granular Synthesis

2006-08-25T19:34:00.000-07:00

This entry is a simple 30 second example of the TGrains UGen in SuperCollider 3. A SynthDef built around TGrains runs on the SC server and its parameters are controlled by my main program. This program reads from a 2-dimensional array at a random interval between 2 and 3 seconds, and sends the composition parameters to the Synth to change its sound.

The sample I chose to granulate is also a synthesised loop with a good frequency distribution. I especially like the end of the example, where a grain of large duration is repeated softly which I thought sounded quite eerie.

The SynthDef:

(
SynthDef("hprGranulator", {
 arg
  buffer,
  centerPos,
  trigRate = 1,
  dur = 1,
  speed = 1,
  pan = 0,
  amp = 0.5,
  out = 0;

 var
  theTGrains;

 theTGrains = TGrains.ar(
  2,
  Impulse.ar(trigRate),
  buffer,
  speed,
  centerPos,
  dur,
  pan,
  amp,
  2
 );
 
 Out.ar(out, theTGrains)

}).send(s);
)

The main program, with SystemClock and 2D array data generation:

(

 var
  data = #[
   [\amp, \dur, \centerPos, \trigRate, \pan],
   [0.1, 4.0, 1, 5, -1],
   [0.2, 0.2, 2, 10, 1],
   [0.4, 0.2, 2.5, 10, 0],
   [0.5, 0.2, 3, 15, 0.7],
   [0.5, 0.5, 3.5, 15, 0.5],
   [0.5, 0.5, 3.7, 15, 0.3],
   [0.7, 0.5, 2, 15, 0.0],
   [0.5, 0.1, 2, 10, -1],
   [0.2, 0.2, 2, 10, 0],
   [0.5, 0.2, 2, 2, 0],
   [0.1, 0.8, 2, 1, -1],
   [0, 0.8, 2, 1, -1]
  ],
     
   count = 0,
  numParams = 5,
  gran;
  

 //Create Synth
 
   gran = Synth(
    "hprGranulator",
   [
    \buffer, ~bufnum,
    \centerPos, 4,
    //\trigRate, 2,
    //\dur, 4,
   //\amp, 0.1
   ], 
   s
  );
  
  //Create Clock
  
  SystemClock.sched(0.0, {
   //arg time;
   //time.postln;
   
   count = count + 1;
   count.postln;
   
   //data[0][count].postln;

   for(0, numParams - 1, {
   arg paramID;
   [ data[0][paramID], data[count][paramID] ].postln;
   
   gran.set( data[0][paramID], data[count][paramID] );

  });
  
  if(count < (data.size - 1),
   { rrand(2.0, 3.5);  //cause task to be rescheduled in 3 seconds' time
    }, 
    { nil;  //returning nil cancels rescheduling
     //gran.free;
    }
  )
   
  }); //end SystemClock.sched
  
  
) //end code

The sound file:

Creative Computing Composition

2006-06-27T07:19:00.000-07:00

Lucky
Henry Reed
5‘01

Program Note

Lucky is a biographical sound texture piece dedicated to my late grandfather. Written in SuperCollider 3, the composition contains a blend of synthesised sounds and variable-rate samples that evoke the passage of his life.

“Lucky” Jack Reed worked for Eastman Kodak before becoming an aerial photographer in World War II. He was shot down over the Pacific, but survived and was eventually rescued. The sound texture I have created contains some of the sounds of the past, plus selected themes played on instruments using SuperCollider’s synthesis engine. The playing of the sound samples is also accomplished through SuperCollider code, which allows the samples to be “scrubbed” forwards and backwards at varying speeds.

A main thread in SuperCollider controls the playing of the various patches. Many of the sound samples are triggered by prime number factors which ensures that the same sound pattern is never played twice. The piece is kept varied through “controlled randomness”; there is a random element in many parameters, such as choice of sample, playback speed, instrument note sequence, and volume.

Listen to the composition here:

Lucky (5'01")

Audio Arts Recording Project

2006-06-17T06:54:00.000-07:00

The Songs

Won't Fade Away (3'50")

Fun With Vibrations (3'07")

The Recording

No major issues – recording process ran remarkably to plan.

I recorded both songs in a three stage process: Drums and both guitars were recorded on the first day in a single take. Afterwards, the bass (played by myself) was recorded in the control room using a direct line into the desk, and I did a mix of the material so far for the benefit of the vocalist. On the second day, the vocals (and digeridoo, on Fun With Vibrations) were recorded in the dead room in several takes, with the intention of constructing a composite vocal line from the best takes.

The drums were set up in the dead room to eliminate spill into the guitar microphones so they could be overdubbed if necessary. The guitars were set up in the main recording space and had their amps close miked with dynamic microphones. My original intention was to record the guitars with a DI and a microphone each, but after listening to the sound check there was so little spill between the guitars that the DI seemed unnecessary and was not used.

The Production

Mixing

The mixing post production of the recording consisted of the following stages:
- Choosing the best take/s of the rhythm bed
- Equalising of instruments
- Constructing a composite bass line
- Adjusting the compression and reverb on the vocals
- Constructing a composite vocal line
- Correcting timing of start and end of song (cues)
- Panning of guitar tracks to left and right speaker
- Recording volume automation for all tracks
- Bouncing down the mix to two mono audio files

Mastering

I then took the mixdown and imported it into Logic 7 for mastering, upon which I applied the following effects:
- Equalisation of stereo image
- Compression of tracks to bring sound up to commercial volume levels
- Adjustment of volume levels of songs 1 and 2 to ensure consistent level between songs
- Hard limiting of output to prevent clipping
- Mixdown and sample rate conversion to stereo interleaved audio file with POW-r dithering at 44100Hz / 16 bit

The Band

Matt Schumann - Drums
Scott Harrow - Vocals and Digeridoo
Marcus Toop - Rhythm Guitar
Tom Simpson - Lead Guitar
Henry Reed - Bass

Week Twelve

2006-06-06T22:07:00.000-07:00

Audio Arts

Our last weekly class of Audio Arts was one of the most interesting. We covered some more Pro Tools session management techniques, discussed issues that class members were having with their recording projects, and then delved into an interesting discussion about the commercial aspects of the recording industry.

Tim Gabbusch talked about some issues he had while making his recording plan for the session. One of his questions was, “If the room has carpet set up especially for a drum kit, should I put the kit there?” Dave’s answer was no, in general – take the floor tom and walk around the room beating it until you get the nicest sound. Then, set up the drum kit around the tom. Dave also mentioned that if you have a group of tracks in Pro Tools, such as you might encounter while recording a kit, then the “create playlist” command creates a new playlist for each track in the group. Handy.

We talked about techniques for using click tracks. Dave mentioned what I thought was a very important point, which was that click tracks don’t necessarily have to be on the quarter note pulse of the music. For slower songs, a click track of eighth notes or even sixteenth notes may make it easier for the musicians to feel the pulse. This information is very important for me, as I will be using a click track in both of my recordings; I have also played on recordings where a click track with a too-slow pulse was used, and it was very difficult to stay in time.

I then asked what the criteria for using a click track were. Dave replied that it depended on the style of the music you were recording and the recording process you were adopting. Pop music is generally recorded to a click track, as this style usually has a very tight, “perfectly in time” feel associated with it. Other styles such as jazz and classical are generally recorded “live” without a click track. Click tracks are also useful when the musicians for a track cannot be there at the same time; they can provide cues for the musicians who arrive later. It must be noted that click tracks tend to “sterilise” the tempo by robbing it of its natural ebb and flow over the course of a song.

The session then turned into a discussion of music marketing and promotion. The most important thing I learned from this is to consider music marketing from the perspective of the record companies. It is likely that a well-organised company has a clearly defined marketing plan and are looking for a particular kind of artist for their next intake of talent. If you want to give yourself the best chance of being picked up by a record label, call them and ask what they are looking for! Then, you won’t waste your time sending in your incredible rock demo, only to have it tossed into the discard pile because the label is looking for a female R&B artist.

Forum: “Squawk Box”

The “guest speaker” section of the forum thus consisted of a “squawk box” where interested students could get up and speak their mind. Vinnie Bhagat took up the majority of the hour with an interesting “love song” that he had composed. Other speakers were Patrick, who was promoting a project that he was organising at the Planetarium, and Tyrell Blackburn, who played some electronic music pieces that he wanted to share with the audience.

References

David Grice. “Audio Arts: Tutorial 12”. Tutorial presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 30 May 2006.

Christian Haines. "Creative Programming: Seminar ". Seminar presented at the Electronic Music Unit, Audio Laboratory, University of Adelaide, 1 June 2006.

Whittington, Stephen. “Music Tech Squawk Box”. Workshop presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 1 June 2006.

Week Eleven

2006-06-06T19:45:00.000-07:00

Audio Arts

Is it possible to create a Christian rock band rhythm section from a can of rice, a coffee plunger, a spring water bottle and two NSW number plates?

The answer is yes. David played a song for us where he and a few others in the studio had gotten creative and sampled sounds using kitchen objects and other junk they happened to have lying around. They then used these sounds in place of the standard pieces of a drum kit. The result was very unusual, but sounded great – it fulfilled the function of a conventional kit but with a unique twist on the sound.

The other instrument sounds in the song also strove to be unconventional. The desired impression was a very smooth sound and was achieved by using a keyboard pad with a slow attack and a fretless bass with most of the high frequencies removed. The other instruments (apart from the female vocals) were two acoustic guitars.

David played us a second song, which was an up-tempo punk rock song. He told us that the punchy, distorted guitar sound had been created by running acoustic guitars through electric guitar distortion. The overall effect was a distorted, crunchy sound that also contained an acoustic “twang”. On top of this, the guitars were “double tracked” (the exact same lines were recorded twice) and panned hard left and right to give a natural sounding thick chorus effect.

The third song turned out to be a recording of Guy Sebastian when he was 14 years old. His voice sounded as good back then as it does now! The technique of interest was the backing vocalists; there were 14 of them in this gospel-influenced track. The backup vocalists were panned around the mix to give the feeling of being completely immersed in the vocal sound.

Creative Computing


(
f = Pbind(
  \freq, Pseq(#[60, 61, 63, 65, 67, 63, 68, 67], inf ).midicps, 
  \dur, 0.5,
  //\octave, 3, 
  \instrument, \HenrysCoolSynthWeek11
).play;
)


//CARRIER SYNTH DEF

(
 s = Server.local;
 
 SynthDef( "HenrysCoolSynthWeek11", 
  { 
   arg  
    freq = 440,   //frequency of note to be sounded
    dur = 1,     //duration of notes in s
    bus = 16,    //output bus
    in = 1;    //input amplitude control bus takes value 0-1
     
   var ampMod = 1, out;
   
   out = RLPF.ar(
     LFSaw.ar(freq + In.kr(in)),  //could insert a SinOsc here for l33t modulation
     LFNoise1.kr(1, 36, 110).midicps,
     0.1
    ) * 
    EnvGen.kr(  
     Env.perc, 
//     levelScale: 0.3 - MouseY.kr(0, 0.25, 'linear'),
     levelScale: 0.3,
     timeScale: dur,
     doneAction: 2 
    );

   Out.ar(bus, out);
   
  }
 ).send(s);
)

b.free;
b = Bus.new(s,1); //assign b to control bus 1
b.postln
b.set(0);
b.set(200);

SynthDescLib.global.read;
SynthDescLib.global.browse;

// SynthDef to modulate amplitude at a control rate.

(
 SynthDef(
  "ControlAmpMod",
  {
   //parameters and their defaults
   arg  modRate = 3,
    modDepth = 20,
    outputBus = 1;
    
   var out;
   
   //assign output
   out = SinOsc.kr(
    modRate, 
    mul: modDepth
   );
      
   //play signal
   Out.kr(outputBus, out);
//   Out.ar(0, out);
  }
 ).send(s)
)

Synth("ControlAmpMod")

(
//delay effect
SynthDef(
 "DelayFX",
 {
  arg  maxDelay = 3.0,
   delay = 1,
   decay = 6,
   inBus = 16,  //receive audio in mono on bus 16
   outBus = 0;  //send audio output to speaker
  
  var outputSignal;
  
  outputSignal = CombN.ar(
   In.ar(inBus, 1),
   maxDelay,   //max delay 
   delay,    //actual delay, stay below max delay 
   decay    //delay decay
   //add: i
  );
  
  Out.ar(outBus, outputSignal);
 }
).send(s);

)


Synth("DelayFX");

What it sounds like:

Stephen Whittington – His Life and Times

Our department head Stephen Whittington took to the stage today to tell us about the projects he has worked on throughout his life. It seems Stephen is a man of many interests, with fields of study including the “globalisation of consciousness”, distributed music performance, human utterances and synchronicity.

The globalisation of consciousness relates to the theory that humanity is evolving from isolated geographical areas to a “global mindset”, brought on by new communications and transportation technology. Distributed music performance means playing with other performers in a remote location, which may be anywhere from the next room to the other side of the world. The ability to do so is facilitated by remote communications networks.

The term “human utterance” refers to any sound produced by the human vocal chords. Speech, as well as vocal expressions such as groans and screams, are human utterances. The interesting point of research is the grey area between speech and other utterances. What special characteristics of speech allow it to convey information, and allows human beings to communicate on a meaningful level?

Finally, the notion of “synchonicity” explores the relation between events that occur in different locations, but at the same time – they are related in the time dimension as opposed to space. Ways to investigate this included recording musicians playing at the same time around the world, then examining their performances for “synchonicity”.

References

David Grice. “Audio Arts: Tutorial 11”. Tutorial presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 23 May 2006.

Christian Haines. "Creative Programming: Seminar ". Seminar presented at the Electronic Music Unit, Audio Laboratory, University of Adelaide, 25 May 2006.

Whittington, Stephen. “His Life And Times”. Workshop presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 25 May 2006.

Week Ten

2006-06-05T00:00:00.000-07:00

Audio Arts

The Audio Arts session this week was most interesting. We got to learn how David himself goes about mixing one of his own sessions (condensed to one hour, of course). His technique is divided into roughly three stages: Firstly, he resets all of the equipment so as to start with a “blank slate”. Then, the mixing process begins, beginning with the most foundational instruments and working upwards to the lead instrument(s). Finally, he uses several listening techniques in order to gain a different perspective on the mix and to fix any errors.

Beginning a mixing session is like starting a painting – you need a fresh canvas from which to work. Thus, all faders are set to zero dB gain, all EQ bands are centred on 0, all patch cables and effects are removed, etc. The most foundational instrument in rock or jazz music is the drum kit, so it is a no brainer to start with this instrument if you are working in those genres. For classical music, use the percussion section if there is one; if not, the deepest instrument such as the cello or double bass usually has the most foundational rhythmic part.

The old adage “less is more” is particularly suited to the art of mixing. Rather than boosting a frequency band to emphasise it in the mix, try cutting the frequencies around it. Not only does this reduce noise, but it also helps avoid the “chasing your tail” problem of increasing and increasing the gain until you can go no further.

When I have mixed in the past, I have always tended to turn up the volume and let the sound kind of “wash over me”. Not recommended, says David – monitoring at a high volume level over an extended period of time tends to desensitise your ears. When you monitor at a fairly quiet level, mistakes are also more easily detected; they tend to leap out at you from the mix. Other techniques for hearing the sound from a different “angle” are listening to the mix in mono (important for mono audiences too!) and, funnily enough, listening from outside in the hallway.

Creative Computing

//HENRY'S COOL SYNTH FOR WEEK 10!!!!!!11111one
(
 s = Server.local;
 
 SynthDef( "HenrysCoolSynthWeek10", 
  { 
   arg  
    freq,   //frequency of note to be sounded
    dur = 1,   //duration of notes in s
    bus = 0;
       
   var out;
      
   out = 
    RLPF.ar(
     LFSaw.ar(freq), //could insert a SinOsc here for l33t modulation
     LFNoise1.kr(1, 36, 110).midicps,
     0.1
    ) * 
    EnvGen.kr(  
     Env.perc, 
     levelScale: 0.3, 
     timeScale: dur,
     doneAction: 2 
    );
        
  4.do({ 
   out =  
    AllpassN.ar(
     out,
     0.05, 
     [0.05.rand, 0.05.rand],
     4
    ) 
  });
  
  Out.ar( bus, out );
  
 }).send(s);
)


//Test the SynthDef with a Pseq (Pattern Sequence)
(
 var freqStream, duration, legato;
 
 freqStream = Pseq(#[60, 61, 63, 65, 67, 63, 68, 67], inf ).asStream.midicps;
 duration = 0.5;
 legato = 1;
 
 a = Task({
  inf.do({
   Synth( "HenrysCoolSynthWeek10", 
    [  \freq, freqStream.next, 
     \dur, legato,
     \bus, 0
    ]
   );
   
   duration.wait;
  });
 })
)

//record output
(
 s.options.sampleRate = 44100;
 s.recHeaderFormat_("AIFF");
 s.recSampleFormat_("int16");
 s.prepareForRecord("recordings/Week10.aiff");
 s.record;
 a.play
 s.stopRecording;
)

Sonic output with duration = 0.4s, legato = 0.2 :

Sonic output with duration = 0.5s, legato = 2.0 (overlapping notes):

Forum

Workshop

We have some really cool listening material at these seminars. I had never heard of Mr Bungle before today, but I think I’m already a fan. The songs we listened to were “Love is a Fist” and “Dead Goon”. Both include an incredible mish-mash of musical styles that left me extremely impressed with the skills of the musicians. Their technical ability in both playing their instruments and in mastering the seamless transition of very disparate styles was eye-opening. It has given me several ideas for music in my own band, and I think I need to purchase some of their albums for research purposes.

The second piece we listened to was Stockhausen’s Hymnen (which translated means “national anthem”. The piece is based on short wave radio – radio broadcasts are mixed and tuned in and out, creating music from the sine tones and static as well as any music that is being played.

Finally, we listened to My Bloody Valentine’s “To here knows when”. This piece was pretty cool; it is based on a very smooth tapestry of harmonic layers that is overlayed with some distorted sounds, all over a clearly defined rhythmic pulse. Interesting.

Guest Speaker: Robert Chalmers

Mr Chalmers gave us a very direct account of copyright law in Australia. Perhaps contrary to the lawyer stereotype, he makes his points clearly and succinctly and unashamedly admits that copyright law in this country is a “dog’s breakfast”. He also mentions that compared to music, literary works are generally protected better – perhaps because lawyers tend to deal in words and understand them more than music.

References

David Grice. “Audio Arts: Tutorial 10”. Tutorial presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 16 May 2006.

Christian Haines. "Creative Programming: Seminar ". Seminar presented at the Electronic Music Unit, Audio Laboratory, University of Adelaide, 18 May 2006.

David Harris. “Workshop – Moment Form”. Workshop presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 18 May 2006.

Robert Chalmers. “An Introduction to Music Copyright Law in Australia”. Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 18 May 2006.

Week Nine

2006-05-14T03:17:00.000-07:00

Audio Arts

The reverb effect was the subject of this week’s tutorial. We first covered the fundamental difference between reverb and delay:

- Delay (as you might suspect) simply delays the signal by the specified amount without altering its harmonic content.
- Reverb is used to simulate the acoustic properties of a space and “colours” the sound by emphasising certain frequencies.

In Pro Tools, a “room” algorithm for the type of reverb can be selected from a list. These algorithms can simulate a hall, cathedral, or room, for example, and the size of the space can also be adjusted. We applied the different reverb types to a woman’s singing voice and listened to the effect.

A useful feature of reverb plugins is the “Pre Delay” parameter, which allows a user to adjust the time period before the reverb effect is applied to the signal. This can be used to great effect on a vocal track, for example, as it allows the “clean” track to be heard a few milliseconds before the effected version; this prevents the original punctuation from being lost in the effect. Another feature that is usually built in is a low pass filter; in real life, high frequencies are absorbed more readily by a space, so the filter allows you to simulate the attenuation of these frequencies in your reverb effect.

David’s lessons are always very informative, and I look forward to applying these techniques and others to my recordings. However, the only opportunity we get to apply all these recording techniques is for a piece of assessment that is worth either 40% or 30% of our grade (depending on Major or Minor Project status). It would be great if we were provided with more opportunity to practice in the course, rather than to just write about it in our blogs.

Creative Computing

This short program uses a Stream to play the blues scale repeatedly; the next tonic of the scale will be a tone below, a tone above, or the same tonic as previously.


a = {
var scale = [0, 3, 5, 6, 7, 10, 12];
var baseCount = 0;

var nextPitch = Routine({
inf.do({arg count;
(scale.wrapAt(count) + baseCount).yield;
if(count % 7 == 0,
{
baseCount = baseCount + (rrand(-1,1) * 2);
},{})
})
});


Pbind(
\midinote, 60 + nextPitch,
\dur, 0.1
).play;
}

//record output
(
s.recHeaderFormat_("WAV");
s.prepareForRecord("recordings/Pbind.wav");
a.play
s.record;
s.stopRecording;
)

Here is what it sounds like:

Forum

We began by listening to two pieces from the late Eighties by an artist known as Christian Marclay. Marclay expresses his artistic intentions by “scratching” works by popular artists on a turntable until they are distorted beyond recognition. I ground my teeth as the famous and elegant Blue Danube Waltz by Johann Strauss was reduced to a sequence of irritating whines from the varying speed of the turntable, falling way out of tune until the piece turned into a hopeless mess. Marclay then applied a similar procedure to a Jimi Hendrix song.

On the bright side, we then listened to some Pink Floyd tracks, which were excellent. I had listened to Dark Side of the Moon but have never really delved deeper into the rest of the Pink Floyd collection, so I was delighted to hear real quality coming from this band, which I thought might have been a little over-hyped. If I were to mix the Avante Garde with rock music, in order to push the boundaries a little, it would be in the Pink Floyd vein. Their tight rhythm changes from funk to shuffle and back again have already inspired me in a song I was working on with my band...

The workshop was followed by some more Honours Student presentations:

• Seb Tomczak, who is working on a cheap, USB powered interface for connecting transducer instruments to a computer.

• Damen Curtis, who is conducting some very interesting research on the medical properties of sound – healing people with certain frequencies, inducing trance-like states, and so forth. Cool.

References

David Grice. “Audio Arts: Tutorial 9”. Tutorial presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 9 May 2006.

Christian Haines. "Creative Programming: Seminar 9". Seminar presented at the Electronic Music Unit, Audio Laboratory, University of Adelaide, 11 May 2006.

David Harris. “Workshop 9”. Workshop presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 11 May 2006.

Week Eight

2006-05-09T19:30:00.000-07:00

Audio Arts

Today was a landmark day in my studies of Music Technology. Not only did I finally grasp the concept of audio compression (after struggling with it for almost a year); today also marked my debut in pet shop advertising voice overs. The topic was “Techniques for recording voice”, and apparently I had the voice, so I was directed to a Neumann U-87 microphone in the EMU space and instructed to give my best Brenton Whittle impersonation. (Brenton is an Adelaide voice over icon; I’ve met him a couple of times through my dad, who is an advertising agent incidentally.)

A pop filter was used on the microphone to stop the plosive consonants (mainly p, b and t) from causing the microphone input to peak. The microphone was set first to omni mode in order to compare this with the conventional cardioid configuration. Also, voice is usually recorded in a dead room, so it was anticipated that the room characteristics would affect the recording somewhat. I read the script, which was an ad for a store called “Pets Village” located in Darwin (“come in and see our complete range for every pet!”). I then set the microphone to cardioid and repeated the recording; we then adjourned to Studio 1 to hear the results. The voice sounded like it was in the middle of a room; good for capturing a “live” musical feel perhaps, but not as suitable for advertising, which needs to cut through with as little reverberation as possible.

Next, the same microphone was set up in the dead room, which David says is not as dead as it could be – it does have some acoustic characteristics. I read the script a few times, which was kind of fun (I’d practiced it a few times by now...) The dead room recording had a very “close up” quality to it, like you were standing right next to the announcer. The dead room recording was used as the basis for a compression effect.

Compression is a tricky concept. Basically, it reduces the dynamic range of your signal. On any compressor there are four main controls:
• Threshold (dB): Adjusts the dynamic range of the signal.
• Ratio (dB/dB): Sets the ratio of compressed to uncompressed signals. For voice overs, the standard ratio is 4:1.
• Attack time (ms): The time taken for compression to kick in if the signal rises above the threshold (reducing the gain of the signal).
• Release time (ms): The time taken for compression to fade out once the signal falls below the threshold (increasing the gain of the signal).

Once compression had been applied, with a short attack and release time (also the standard for voice overs), my voice was sounding a lot more professional. Of course, it helps when you’ve got such a wonderful voice to start with.*

* And are modest.

Music Tech Forum

We went retro this week with the best Forum ever. Music from Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa and the more Avante Garde Pierre Henri was played. We looked at instances in the music of these bands where electronic instruments had been used in the popular idiom (although these bands were popular and progressive – something that unfortunately seems to happen rarely these days). The pieces covered were:

Led Zeppelin: “Whole Lotta Love” from II
These guys are brilliant... a rocking song with a highly experimental bridge section featuring a distorted Theremin?! Lots of cool effects achieved with this instrument, including unpitched noises.

Pink Floyd: “Bike” from Relics (1968)
Early Syd Barrett Floyd. A classic 60s pop tune but with some very odd echo effects applied to the vocal track. This song also fades out in the middle and we are treated to a series of tape effects, bell-like modulation tones, clashes and crunches.

Pink Floyd: “Breathe” from The Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
Great piece from one of the greatest albums ever made, featuring the pounding, urgent tones of a VCS-3 synthesiser coupled with tape effects.

We also listened to “Mr Green Genes” by Frank Zappa, and “Voila d’Orphage” by Pierre Henri. I didn’t really like either of the tracks, and “Voila d’Orphage” did not affect my emotions whatsoever. You can’t listen to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin all lesson, though.

Creative Computing

This week’s task was to use sequencing techniques to produce a musical sequence that controlled the SynthDefs we created last week. My piece of code iterates through a sequence of major arpeggios in increments of a semitone, spanning the octave starting at middle C. There is therefore an inner loop, which produces the arpeggio pattern, and an outer loop, which iterates chromatically through the octave.

Here is the code:



//This program iterates over the major arpeggio of all 12 keys, starting on middle C.

//Load AM Synth Definition
SynthDef("AMSynth",
 {
  //parameters and their defaults
  arg freq = 440, rate = 1, depth = 0.5, out;
  //assign output
  out = SinOsc.ar(freq, mul: SinOsc.ar(rate, mul: depth));
  //play signal
  Out.ar(0, out);
 }
).load(s)

//Assign synth
a = Synth("AMSynth");
a.set(\rate, 5, \depth, 0.6);

(
 //construct ascending and descending arpeggio
 var arpegPattern = [0, 4, 7, 12, 7, 4, 0];
 //var arpegPattern = [0, 4, 7, 12].mirror;   //useful way to set asc - desc array
 var noteOffset = 60; //Start on middle C
 var noteDelay = 0.2;  //200ms delay between notes
 var numArpeggios = 12; //Play chromatically from middle C
 
 //create a new task to play the arpeggios
 r = Task({
  numArpeggios.do({
   arg arpCount;
   
   //Iterate through the array
   arpegPattern.do({
    arg item, noteCount;
    item = item + noteOffset + arpCount;
    //item.postln;
    //noteCount.postln;
    
    //tell the synth to play the new note
    a.set(\freq, midicps(item));
    if(noteCount < 6,
    { //Play a triplet
     wait(noteDelay);
    },
    { //Play dotted crotchet
     wait(3*noteDelay);
    })
   })
   
   //noteDelay.wait;  
  })
 })
)

//start and stop the task
(
 s.recHeaderFormat_("WAV")
 s.recHeaderFormat
 s.recSampleFormat
  
 s.prepareForRecord("recordings/AM.wav");
 s.record;
 r.start;
 r.stop;
 s.stopRecording;
)

And the sonic output as an AAC file (.m4a):

References

Christian Haines. "Creative Programming: Seminar 8". Seminar presented at the Electronic Music Unit, Audio Laboratory, University of Adelaide, 4 May 2006.

David Grice. “Audio Arts: Tutorial 8”. Tutorial presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 2 May 2006.

David Harris. “Workshop - Avante Garde Instruments in Popular Music”. Workshop presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 4 May 2006.

Week Seven

2006-05-01T01:11:00.000-07:00

Disease Prevents Henry From Attending Class

I missed the forum this week due to a nasty head cold which left me pretty much unable to get up and do anything on the Thursday. This meant I missed Creative Computing, also on Thursday, and Tuesday was Anzac Day so there was no Audio Arts tutorial either! ...I will do something to catch up Thursday's classes ASAP.

Henry

Week Six

2006-04-09T22:16:00.000-07:00

Creative Programming

Our programming topics for this week were many of the other UGens (White noise, Pink noise, Black noise, and just about every other colour of sound you can hear) and also how to record your SuperCollider output. Recording sound from the SC server is quite straightforward; just tell the server “s.prepareForRecord([filePath]/file.wav)” to create an audio file on disk. Then, executing s.record will cause the audio server s to begin writing its audio output to the file.

We tested the recording function with everyone’s favourite test tone, the sine wave. To test the integrity of the saved file we opened it in Bias Peak where it played as expected.

The week’s homework assignment was to study some relevant topics in the Mark Polishook SuperCollider tutorial. Topics covered included an informative section on debugging and some foundational material on synthesis that was useful to see from a different perspective than the first tutorial.

Audio Arts

This week we recorded the string quartet in the studio, as it is much easier to organise all the equipment this way. Jason, Holly, Neil and Kim set up their instruments in the recording space and rehearsed as usual, while we prepared a selection of microphones to compare. We used the following gear:

2 x Neumann U87A (omni mode, in a widely spaced stereo pair)
2 x Rode NT3 (Cardioid condenser microphones, closer together)
1 x Rode NT4 (Permanent X-Y configuration microphone, placed dead centre)
2 x Rode NT5 (Pencil condenser microphones placed in a manual X-Y configuration)

We set up a recording session in Pro Tools and recorded a block of five minutes or so. Afterwards, we listened to each set of microphones in turn to gauge their different characteristics. We found the following results:

The U87s: Very warm, expensive sound from an expensive mic. However, the wide spacing of these mics left something missing from the centre of the stereo image.

The NT3s: A harsher, more brittle sound than the U87s. However, as the NT3s were closer together, a reasonably good panning balance was achieved.

NT4 X-Y mic: Similar tone quality to the NT3s (I suppose due to coming from the same manufacturer). Nothing wrong here.

NT5s in manual X-Y: Tone was ok, but you could tell how far away these mics were compared to the others. Three stars.

Forum

Part 1: Composers and Pieces

Edgard Vares (1883-1965) was the first subject of the Forum. Vares was one of the early Modernist composers; most of his work was done during the 20s and 30s, although he also had a late period of output in the 60s due to increased interest in his previous works. We listened to his piece Ecuatorial (1934) which is quite unusual for that historical period. It is scored for bass voice, 4 trumpets, 4 trombones, piano, 5 percussionists and 2 Theremins! The piece is very dramatic and frequently changes mood from solemn to brooding, to agitated, to furious, propelled by the compelling bass vocalist. The vocal part sounds quasi-improvised in sections and varies from powerful melodic phrases to words that are softly spoken.

We next listened to Milton Babbitt, an American composer who throughout his life composed exclusively using the technique of serialism. Ensembles for Synthesizer was written in the early 50s and contains a huge variety of sounds; there are piano and harpsichord-like tones, loud crashes and sonic bursts, and warbling tones. I thought however that the piece was a bit long and that most of it sounded very similar. Perhaps a second listening would be required to appreciate the intricacies of Babitt’s serial technique.

We finished in genuine chronological order with Barry Truax, composer of Wings Of Nike I (1987). The piece is built by granular synthesis and was my favourite of the three. It begins with a thick, solid chord that seems to “shimmer” with the richness of its overtones. This chord is developed and varied over the duration of the piece, and combined with “glistening” high sounds and background noise that sounded like the urgent pounding of machinery.

Part 2: What is Music Technology?

A discussion was held to try and define Music Technology as it meant to the School, and this discussion was led by a panel of three – Mark Carrol, Stephen Whittington and a Masters student, Tristan Louth-Robins. It began with a brief history of how the Music Technology faculty was formed, and how it used to be called the “Performing Arts Technology Unit”. The two main points of the discussion were:

Whether Music Technology was a discipline in its own right, or an amalgamation of disciplines such as Composition, Computer Science and Engineering;

If the focus of Music Technology was artistic or vocational (e.g. preparing students for a job as a recording engineer).

It was an interesting discussion, as the Music Technology department does offer a lot of variety in its learning material, making it hard to classify exactly what qualities a graduate of the discipline is supposed to possess, much less what kind of job they will get. I did think however that the suggestion that university in general is about “pure” learning with disregard of vocational aspects was preposterous – my other degree, and most of the others provided by the tertiary education system, are about providing graduates with the skills to get a job as a lawyer, an accountant, a doctor, a nurse, an architect, an engineer… A non-vocational degree is nice in theory, but unfortunately you can’t eat knowledge. Even the much-maligned B.A. (Bachelor of Attendance J) students develop critical thinking abilities through their coursework that are very useful (and highly desirable by prospective employers) in the workplace.

So, you tell someone you study Music Technology. They (like possibly 100% of all non-Music Technologists) ask you what that means. What do you say? And the answer to this question is very, VERY important. Why? Because if you can’t describe it in a few short sentence (or preferably, one short sentence), there is NO WAY that knowledge of this product (yes, it is a product, for sale to students) can spread by word of mouth. And if it can’t spread by word of mouth, then it will always be limited to a very exclusive group of Music Technologists – who can’t even define it themselves!

The solution to defining the undefinable is to break it up. Break Music Technology into the vocational aspects (Pro Tools, microphone placement, mastering, etc.) and the artistic aspects (electronic composition, critical listening, music history). Then, at least, you will be able to tell someone if you are a Composer or a Sound Engineer. And, the best thing is, you can still be both – and privately call yourself a Music Technologist.

References

Christian Haines. "Creative Programming: Seminar 6". Seminar presented at the Electronic Music Unit, Audio Laboratory, University of Adelaide, 5 April 2006.

David Grice. “Audio Arts: Tutorial 6”. Tutorial presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 4 April 2006.

David Harris. “Workshop - The Music of Edgard Vares, Milton Babbitt and Barry Truax”. Workshop presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 6 April 2006.

Week Five

2006-04-03T00:03:00.000-07:00

Audio Arts: Advanced Multi Micing

The mission: To successfully record a string quartet with a stereo microphone pair as they rehearsed. The destination: Bishop Hall in the Elder Conservatorium. The crew: Our Music Technology class – Tyrell, Poppi, Tim, Martin, Adrian and myself, and of course our stoic leader David…

We began by packing up several microphones, including two U-89s and a stereo X-Y mic. We also packed a solid-state recorder that recorded to a flash memory card. Our troupe then set off to the Con, where we met the string quartet and began to walk around the room searching for a “good patch of air”.

I was interested to find that an area behind the quartet, near the back of the room, had a very nice acoustic quality. This may have been due to the floor at that location, which was hard wood instead of carpet. However, the air there was perhaps too rich in reverb for a clean recording, and I continued searching. The point directly in front of the quartet was certainly loud, but it didn’t have any of the richness of the previous sound. It was at that point that David suggested standing on a chair to test the sound quality closer to the ceiling, and this turned out to be very nice. The best and final location was agreed to be a bit further away from the quartet, about midway between the floor and ceiling. I have marked the final location on the diagram with (according to tradition) a large black X.

There was a snag when we went to record – the flash memory card for our solid state recorder was missing. Tyrell ran back to the Music Tech department to retrieve a DAT tape recorder instead. Unfortunately this unit didn’t have phantom power for our condenser microphones. We ended up having to use a Sony figure-of-8 microphone that came with the DAT machine, which wasn’t as good quality as the others. But at least we got something recorded. Next week, we will listen to the recording and maybe try again (with a flash memory card this time).

Workshop: The Music of John Cage

We listened to three pieces by Cage; two were from his early-mid compositional period, and the last from much later in his life.

Music For Carillon I (1954) is a composition that uses elements of randomness. Another unusual feature of the piece is that the score is notated exactly against time; the performer uses a chronometer while playing. Instead of notating exactly the notes to be played, there is intead a rough guide of how the performer should play, and the period of time over which they should do so.

Williams Mix (1952) was painstakingly crafted from 8 tapes of material over a period of 9 months. Each sound on the final reel (and there were many) was exactly positioned by Cage with the aid of two colleagues. The piece contains, amongst the cacophony of different sounds: Snatches of laughter, driving rhythms, surging bass tones, screams, and shouts.

101 (1989) showcases Cage’s love of unusual instruments, as well as unconventional techniques for playing the more common ones. Strings play col legno (striking the string with the ‘wrong’ side of the bow), a piano is played with a bow, and there is also a ‘Bullroarer’ or wind machine (which produces sound by rubbing two pieces of canvas together) in the mix.

Guest Speaker: Chris Williams

Chris works as a producer for the Radio National ABC radio station. He has worked on the production of drama pieces that have been played on the air in most of the major capital cities. In his presentation, he talked about the equipment and software systems they used for production at the ABC, and then went on to show us an example session.

Due to the dramatic nature of some of the works, their studio may be set up to suggest a particular location so that it feels more natural for the actors. The team spend some time going over the script, then record a performance. For recording, a Sennheiser 69 dual capsule microphone is used to capture room ambience, while a Neumann U67 is used for speaking voices. To prevent the loss of recorded material due to computer crashes, the audio stream is simultaneously written to DAT tape as well as to hard disk.

Once the recording has taken place, it is Chris’s responsibility to make the finished session sound as good as it can. To do this, he usually prefers to work from home using Pro Tools software. The finished example that we were played in the presentation was the end result of two and a half weeks of polishing. In this purely audio environment, being true to the script is not so important – if something sounds good, he will use it. Monologues From The Apocalypse was an example of a piece where the actors worked from a composed music bed. This was an interesting approach, being the opposite of conventional radio and film drama where the musical score is written last.

References

Chris Williams. "Artist Talk - Producing for Radio at the ABC". Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 30 March 2006.

Christian Haines. "Creative Programming: Seminar 5". Seminar presented at the Electronic Music Unit, Audio Laboratory, University of Adelaide, 29 March 2006.

David Grice. “Audio Arts: Tutorial 5”. Tutorial presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 28 March 2006.

David Harris. “Workshop - The Life and Music of John Cage.” Workshop presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 30 March 2006.

Week Four

2006-03-26T15:16:00.000-08:00

Audio Arts

The topic of this week’s session was noise gates and their recording applications. Noise gates have a simple function: While the signal is below a certain level, the gate remains closed and no signal passes through. Once the signal rises above this threshold, the gate opens and lets all of the signal through.

The most widespread use for gates is to control spill from other instruments; the example we were shown in class used the floor tom of a jazz drum kit. The microphone on the floor tom had picked up a lot of spill and vibration from the snare and bass drum; however, the tom was played much less frequently, which meant this spill only served to muddy the mix. We added a gate to the floor tom signal and set the threshold such that the gate only opened when the tom was directly hit (as this produced a high signal input to the floor tom mic). Now, the gate remained shut for the majority of time, and extra noise was only introduced when the floor tom was actually being played.

Gates have several other parameters in addition to the threshold that can be set to make the sound as natural as possible. Here are some of the most common:

Attack: the time (ms) that the signal takes to reach maximum level once the gate has been opened.

Decay: similar parameter (ms) for reaching minimum level when the gate is closed.

Hold Time: The minimum time (ms) that the gate will remain open after it is triggered.

Range: An amount of signal that is let through even when the gate is closed. (Generally not recommended – it is usually better to get the threshold setting right)

Gates are most useful when applied to percussive and brash sounding instruments – those that have a short attack time, like drums and brass. On a drum kit, a gate can create a crisp, punchy effect that sounds good in rock music. Another creative use for a noise gate is to control a “side chain” – the signal from one instrument opens the gates of others. This can much improve an ensemble that was out of time, or create an exceptionally tight sound. Phil Collins’s horn section used a noise gate that was triggered by the lead trumpet player, giving the impression that all the players were exactly in time.

Creative Computing

Our exercise was to go through the Making Sound section of Scott Wilson’s tutorial for SuperCollider. This had the effect of showing SuperCollider to be one sweet programming language. There is a lot of flexibility in the system, such as with Array objects – I like how Array has methods like choose (return an array element at random) built in, and how unit generator objects respond to passing an array as a parameter – they automatically duplicate themselves for multiple channels, and replicate all parameters except for arrays containing multiple specific elements.

Another thing that is REALLY cool are the examples in the tutorials, which can be run from inside the documentation window – you simply select the code and hit the enter key to send it to the interpreter. Or, if there are several lines of code, you can hit enter multiple times and execute the lines one at a time (which I actually discovered by accident). I was wondering why they went to all the trouble of writing an RTF-based text editor, but executable documentation is a killer reason. This feature is going to save a lot of time.

Code reuse in SC is achieved by separating blocks of code into functions, which are encased by curly brackets {}. Functions can be used once, or can be reused by assigning them to a variable (such as the built-in variable letters a-z). Functions that produce sound can have the play method invoked on them, which sends their output to the audio server (which produces a sound waveform from the data). The server is probably worth mentioning at this point: It needs to be started when you run the program, and is usually referred to by the letter s in your code. You generally use the localhost server, which runs on your computer and communicates with the interpreter via TCP/IP. There is also an internalserver which runs in the same memory space as the SC user interface.

In the tutorials so far, we learned to make the fundamental wave types, like sine and sawtooth waves. We also learned functions for generating pink noise. Another handy feature of these Unit Generators (like SinOsc and Saw) is their ability to provide both audio rate (.ar) and control rate (.kr) values when these functions are evaluated. Audio rate values are high resolution (but consume a lot of CPU time) and are converted directly into a waveform. Control rate values are a much lower resolution and are used to control other parameters with the output of a UGen; by controlling volume with a sawtooth (ramp) wave, for example.

Other things I tried were the stereo panning effects and the “stethoscope”, which is like an oscilloscope for viewing the sound being created. Sweet.

Forum

I was unable to attend Forum this week due to medical reasons (wisdom teeth removed on Wednesday). I will catch up as soon as possible and will post my findings here.

References

Christian Haines. "Creative Programming: Lecture 4". Seminar presented at the Electronic Music Unit, Audio Laboratory, University of Adelaide, 22 March 2006.

David Grice. “Audio Arts: Tutorial 4”. Tutorial presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 21 March 2006.

Week Three

2006-03-19T22:26:00.000-08:00

Music Tech Forum

Workshop

Our workshop this week was mainly about the artist Glenn Branca and his piece Symphony No. 3. Branca is a New Yorker who is noted for performing in The Kitchen, an Avante-garde venue in the city with special acoustic properties. Symphony No. 3 is scored for 6 keyboards, 7 electric guitars (which are sometimes bowed with sections of horsehair) and drum kit. The instruments are also tuned to the harmonic series instead of more conventional just intonation.

The piece begins with a series of long, sustained chords that are slowly varied harmonically and timbrally. Patches of dissonance seem to swell within these chords and gradually resolve back to harmony. These long chords start to increase in tempo, almost imperceptably at first, and then becoming frequent. Finally, the final chord is held indefinitely about two-thirds of the way through the piece, and this point also marks the entry of the drum kit. This long chord swells in volume until the climax of the piece, then fades away to nothing. Although the chord is long and unbroken, there are many complex timbral shifts within it, which as I listener I found captivating.

Another work that was played was a spoken word piece by Robert Ashley of The Wolfman fame. Ashley is also a New York artist, and his piece consists of speech tape loops against a background of synthesised tones and beeps. The speech loops had a very unnatural sound to them as the breaths had been cut from the tape, giving the piece a rushed, urgent character. There was a fundamental phrase that was steadly augmented and varied over the duration of the work.

Guest Speaker

Gordon Monro was the guest speaker this week and is a Sydney artist who completed a Masters in Music at Sydney Conservatorium. Monro used to be a mathematician but took up music out of interest, and much of his time recently has been spent creating “Generative Artworks” – rule-based systems that create a musical outcome. He is displaying a work at the moment as part of the Adelaide Festival called Evochord. The work is computer controlled and uses a genetic algorithm to “evolve” a chord from dissonance to harmony, by steadily mutating its 19 constituent notes.

His other works include What Are You Really Thinking, which transformed brainwave data into music, and Red Grains, which used the reflective patterns made by lasers to produce sound by granular synthesis.

Audio Arts

This week we put the Mid-Side technique for recording a grand piano into practice. A Figure 8 mic (Neumann U-89) was set up on the side of the piano with one side pointing towards the bass. We then listened to the sound through the studio monitors as a class member played the piano. The side of the mic pointing towards the bass strings was then swapped, and we again compared the sound. Our test showed that this sound was significantly sharper and brighter than the first; however, we wanted the warmest possible sound, so we reverted to the first side.

A second U-89 was positioned directly above the first, upside down, and set to Omni mode. This was to ensure a consistent phase in the recording. The Omni mic picked up more of the room’s characteristics.

Our final Pro Tools setup contained three tracks:

Normal Figure 8 (for a warm and full bass tone)
Omni Mic
Inverted Figure 8

We spent the rest of the session listening to and discussing a jazz recording David made, and other techniques he used – especially the judicious positioning of instruments to avoid bleed into the piano microphones.

Creative Computing

We discussed more aspects of the SuperCollider language.

The building blocks of SC are called Unit Generators (U-Gens). These systems generate or perform operations on a digital audio stream, which can be selectively routed. The routing is achieved via Audio Buses, which are equivalent to the yellow patch cables in Max/MSP, and Control Buses, which are similar to the regular patch cables and carry control signals.

Other features covered were:

Buffers – store a stream of digital audio
Shared Buses – allow synchronous reading and writing operations, so new sounds can be loaded while playing others
Synth definitions – Files that describe the behaviour of the building blocks used to construct synthesizers
Help file locations of all the above.

References

Gordon Monro. "Artist Talk - Gordon Monroe and Genetic Art (sound and visual realisation through mathematics)”. Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 16 March 2006.

Christian Haines. "Creative Programming: Lecture 3". Seminar presented at the Electronic Music Unit, Audio Laboratory, University of Adelaide, 15 March 2006.

David Grice. “Audio Arts: Tutorial 3”. Tutorial presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 14 March 2006.

David Harris. “Workshop - To introduce students to naturally tempered music, the rich
resultant rhythms and ambience.” Workshop presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 16 March 2006.

Week Two

2006-03-13T18:22:00.000-08:00

Audio Arts

This week we covered the theory behind the Mid-Side microphone placement technique for recording a piano, which involves creating a stereo image from a mono Figure 8 microphone. This has the effect of adding space to the recording and produces a very natural, transparent piano sound. A second Omni microphone captures the rest of the sound image. The technique was sourced from Michael Stavrou’s book Mixing With Your Mind, which I highly recommend as it is an absolute gold mine.

As the Mid-Side technique will be covered in detail in our practical next week, I will only mention it here briefly. Basically, the Figure 8 microphone is set up close to the sound board in the middle of the right hand side of the piano (as you might expect from the name). One side of the mike is pointed towards the bass strings, and the other points away from the piano. The Omni mike is set up close to the Figure-8. From this setup you record three tracks into your sequencer: Figure 8 (normal), Figure 8 (phase inverted), and Omni.

We also briefly touched on a technique using an X-Y configuration, also from Stavrou, and reviewed the common microphone pattern types: Omni, Cardioid, Hypercardioid and Figure 8. Finally, we discussed the differences between condenser and dynamic microphones, and I discovered something I didn’t know before: some condenser mikes can be powered by batteries if the mixing desk doesn’t have phantom power. Cool.

Creative Computing

We were introduced to the SuperCollider IDE (Integrated Development Environment) which offers a number of features: Syntax highlighting (which colours key words and makes the code more readable) and just-in-time compilation (allowing your code to be compiled and tested in sections). SuperCollider source code files are saved in RTF (Rich Text Format) to preserve their formatting, but as a side effect they cannot be edited by plain text editors or other IDEs.

“Hello World” is a common first program you write in a new language, and we were shown how to print this text to the “Post” (standard output) window in SC using the .postln method. Interestingly, postln appears to be a member of the String class in SC, as the syntax is “Hello World” .postln.

The IDE also provides a contextual help feature and can look up keywords if you select them and type Cmd-Shift-?. The help system is also written in rtf but contains hyperlinks for easy cross referencing.

Music Tech Forum

I was unable to attend Forum last week due to the first of two timetable clashes I have this semester. Will be able to complete this section once I have a digitised version of the video.

*Update 20/04/2006
I have watched the video footage. Here is my updated blog entry for Warren Burt's presentation:

Warren Burt

This man is obviously extremely bright and talented. Over his long career (he has been making electronic music since 1957!) Burt has been involved in projects ranging from writing the soundtrack to abstract film, to building highly entertaining public sound installations, to building tuning forks in unusual divisions of the octave, to making the world’s smallest digitally controlled analogue synth. During his education at the University of Michigan he assisted the likes of John Cage and Alvin Lucier with their compositions in the studio. He came to Adelaide to perform some of his works; a notable example was played to us in class and consists of a program written in Plogue Bidule that generates tone patterns based on both random algorithms and user input (via a video game controller). He is also a very engaging and entertaining speaker, and his presentation held the attention despite its length of over 90 minutes.

Warren Burt seems to be the consummate Music Technologist, and if ever a definition were needed for the term I think he would be it. He seems to combine a very musical background with excellent skills in electronics, although some of them are hardly orthodox. In stark contrast with engineering principles, which strive for consistency and predictability, Burt prefers instead to literally hit electronic components with a hammer to randomly affect their electrical characteristics. The unpredictability of this produces very interesting musical timbres. His personality is a unique combination of unbridled creativity and a thought process that seems thoroughly logical (although perhaps containing more of the former!) and at age 57, it doesn’t appear to be showing any signs of slowing down.

References

David Grice. “Audio Arts: Tutorial 2”. Tutorial presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 7 March 2006.

Christian Haines. "Creative Programming: Seminar 2". Seminar presented at the Electronic Music Unit, Audio Laboratory, University of Adelaide, 8 March 2006.

Warren Burt. "Artist Talk - My Life and Works". Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 9 March 2006.

Week One

2006-03-05T05:51:00.000-08:00

Music Tech Forum

Our first presenter at Forum was a Canadian named Robin Minard. Robin is a sound installation specialist who, of all things, claims Muzak (the terrible music that is manufactured for and played in shopping malls, to make people relax and buy more products) as his source of inspiration. About one quarter of the city of Montreal, where he grew up, is underground due to the extreme cold, and in this environment there is Muzak playing all the time. Minard was disappointed with the saturation of this environment with poor quality music, and was convinced that he could do better justice to the space where it was being played.

He started with the principle that a person’s perception of a space has more to do with what they are hearing than what their eyes are seeing. Could he change the properties of a space simply by playing certain tones? If the perception of a space could be profoundly changed by music, then each time they entered it they could experience something different. However, traditional music loses its function if its listener is merely passing through a space over the course of a few seconds. The exposition of a theme, for example, and its ensuing development and recapitulation, would be entirely lost on a passer-by. Armed with these ideas, Minard embarked upon a series of highly creative and often groundbreaking compositions.

Minard played an example piece for the forum, written for vibraphone and tape delay. The composition was based on the beating effect between the notes F, G and A. He stressed however that the piece was not intended to be performed in concert, but to be experienced “in place”. It begins softly, at the lower range of the instrument, and gradually climbs to the highest notes before an equally gradual descent, and the conclusion of the piece.

Another of his pieces, a “Musical Passageway”, consists of a series of vertical pipes of different lengths, each with a speaker mounted in the bottom. As the work is played, different pipes resonate at their characteristic frequency, giving a “surround sound” effect that is complicated by the varying locations of pipes that are resonating. A further piece was written for an indoor greenhouse display; this work aimed to draw attention to the sounds that were already happening in the space, by replicating them and creating a recorded composition from them. As a result, listeners were made aware of sounds like cars passing in the rain and the drip-drip of water from the plants, and by the time they left the display they were hopefully more attuned to the natural beauty of sounds in the environment.

I think Robin Minard’s inspiration and his work is clever – he is quite the opportunist, loosely taking the principles behind ugly, mass produced Muzak and spinning from them ambient music in its art form. Muzak, for example, has the high frequencies deliberately exaggerated; doing so ensures there will be no unwanted resonance within a space, allowing the “product” to be used anywhere. Minard’s music, on the other hand, is carefully designed to compliment and augment the characteristics of a specific space, and no other music might do it better.

Audio Arts

In Week 1 we learned how to group tracks together in the timeline window. By grouping tracks, a single edit can be applied to the group as a whole. Groups of commonly used tracks can also be collectively armed to record.

Playlists were a second feature we were introduced to. By creating a new playlist for each audio take, these collections of tracks can stacked on top of each other and the user can easily toggle between them. This technique makes for a more efficient workflow than storing multiple takes one after the other.

Creative Computing

We were introduced to the principles of text-based programming, and the differences between this and visual programming languages such as Max/MSP. Despite these differences, a text based language (SuperCollider) and Max are both built from a lower level language called C. This is an example of abstraction, where information about the underlying program structure is hidden from the user. Abstraction is the process where the amount of control over a system is traded for ease of use. It is especially effective if the system is being used for a specific task (such as music data manipulation).

A more concrete example of abtraction is the controls of a car. Information about the car’s engine is hidden (under the hood) and abstracted to the user (driver) in the form of the steering wheel, pedals and gear levers. This is effective because the extremely versatile petrol engine is being used for a specific task – ie, to propel a car from A to B.

References

Robin Minard. "Artist Talk - Sound Installation: art and practice”. Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 2 March 2006.

Christian Haines. "Creative Programming: Seminar 1". Seminar presented at the Electronic Music Unit, Audio Laboratory, University of Adelaide, 1 March 2006.

David Grice. “Audio Arts: Lecture 1”. Tutorial presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 28 February 2006.