Maestoso

In the back alleys of a highland town, a beaten path rises to the summit. Those who stagger to the top may find that adventure awaits them in the skies.

waltz + fughetta

16 Variations on “A Happy Day”

Hey yeah I used my student copy too lmaooo

The way matlab processes sound it takes a vector where value represents the magnitude of the sound wave at each 1/8192 of a second (8192Hz being Fs or sampling rate, you can change it but 8192 is the default). As a basic example, the vector representing the sound of a sine wave for x seconds is sin(2*pi*f*time vector) where the time vector is 0:x in steps of 1/Fs.

That way to play notes on top of each other or to generate different timbres, you can just add sine waves! Then using sound() or soundsc() you can play it back. There’s also a random command that generates white noise I think, it might be randn(). That way you can generate percussion sounds in a limited way.

I can send you my code if you want but its probably really hard to read; I did some awful disgusting fudging around b/c since Fs is a whole number you get rounding errors sometimes and I just straight up made it tack on zeroes at the end to make it match up when I added the tracks which is honestly disgusting & I probably should’ve done something with like timecodes or something that preserves relationships on a macro scale. Plus, I used just temperament when equal temperament is probably way easier to work with, so... if you want my code I’ll probably send it along with some other sample codes that might be easier to read.

Some things to keep in mind when messing around are that:

if youre adding things they have to be the same size exactly

notes usually have natural decay which helps differentiate repeated notes

high frequencies can be really challenging to work with / annoying & I lucked out because the composition I used doesn’t use many high notes which wasn’t a conscious decision

if youre adding overtones onto something to change the timbre make sure to stop before the nyquist frequency = half the sampling frequency = something i just found out about two days ago

to convert to mp3 I used audiowrite() which takes the filename as characters, the sound vector, & Fs as the arguments

I finished this a bit ago but haven’t gotten around to recording it, so, please enjoy this electronic recording of my fugue in D major that I made from scratch in Matlab. It’s justly tempered so if things sound slightly off that may explain some of it.

Slight volume warning / be wary even if it sounds fine in the beginning.

Heptagonal Rose

10″ x 10″

Check out this book I made!

It’s all hand-drawn and everything, you can print your own, cut off the edges, fold it up and uh, proceed to read it, or, like, whatever, color it in, burn it, print off 30 copies and hand them out on the street corner & start a local church dedicated to it. or something

Also here’s the back cover:

Prelude (7/22/14) and Fugue (11/24/15)

A little piece I wrote about the hemiola.