Music and Tech 2

Today was the final presentation. Aside from a hiccup with SuperCollider and a little mistake with the rhythm pattern, I’m quite happy with how my performance went.

Over the course of the semester, I accumulated 15 new SuperCollider patches in my folder of works. A few of these are versions of my live coding practice sessions that I saved to revisit for ideas; the rest are experimenting with different synthesis techniques, live-coding workflows, GUIs, and other bits and pieces, all made with the intent of figuring out what works best in a live environment. 

Prior to this semester, I had never seriously attempted live-coding. I had 3 sessions in late 2017 where I experimented with it, without much success. It wasn’t until this semester that I revisited it, and I’m very happy with the progress I made.

My plan now is really just to continue. I’ve made it over the biggest hurdle -- that is, giving it a few tries and understanding how it works -- and now I want to take it further, to really see what I can do. I plan to continue practicing and maybe attend some open-mic events or similar. There are so many more things to experiment with (now that I’m not under pressure of a deadline, I’d like to give TidalCycles another go).

A final thank you to Professor Hamilton for his insight over the course of the semester and, of course, for running the class. It’s been a great excuse to spend hours messing around with SuperCollider, and so much fun seeing everyone’s projects take shape.

03/06/19

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhseAuL0lhM

03/04/2019, SuperCollider

(note: this one is definitely a Do Not Listen In Class)

i put this off till the end of the day because I was hoping I’d have some kind of musical inspiration. that didn’t happen. so this recording is very much Something Different, and it was a lot of fun and i learned a lot from it (definitely going to use those WhiteNoise clicks more), but it is definitely not “good” or “listenable”. Good night

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZZPg80032s

03/03/2019, SuperCollider

it’s spring break and I’m going to TRY to record at least one of these a day every day. But, I have three other school projects I need to be working on, plus internship hunting, plus an overnight sleep study, plus being a normal human being, so we’ll see how it works out.

Feb 11 2019, SuperCollider

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bD4G2a-NfjY&feature=youtu.be

(i didn’t upload #3 because it was extremely terrible -- great practice, but a bit of a buggy, atonal, arhythmic mess)

From video description: misunderstood the behavior of Pbind (specifically, how to modify running Pbinds). caused interesting behavior with the drone synth's rhythm, where multiple arhythmic Pbinds were modifying it. didn't figure out what was causing this until the very end, but it made things interesting.drone sound was kinda cool for making it on-the-spot; i really like PWM, and the little LFOs on the lowpass filter just made it that touch more interesting. wish i'd put more thought into the bells, i bet you can do some really interesting things with that kind of sound. maybe use that as a percussion instead of plain old synthesized drum sounds?  General updates:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSI2zJ406fI Jan 30 2019, SuperCollider

https://youtu.be/VmMYaDl_VN0

This week I’ve spent some time looking into TidalCycles, but I’m struggling to understand it’s syntax so for now I’m working with SuperCollider.

For this session I created one synth and used it for quick practice with Pbindefs, tempoclocks, and sequencing. I like the sound of the synth (and it has plenty of parameters to tweak it well beyond what I do in this session), although I still need a lot more practice to make use of more parameters in a live session.

This took a few takes because of some technical glitches and also my broccoli finished baking halfway through one session and I had to attend to that, very important. There were more than a few mistakes here but I think it’s a decent start.

SuperSampler: A New Polyphonic Concatenative Sample Synthesizer in SuperCollider for Sound Motive Creative, Live Coding, and Improvisation