Uncorking this bottle sounded too good to not record. The sample's not as clean as I would have liked, but the sound itself is still really cool. And works well pitch shifted along Reason's NNXT Sampler. Results below.
Hi folks,
As you may know, I'm not the only one who received an IGDA scholarship to GDC 09, and the 25 of us have banded together to start a blog of our own. Game Developers Blog is basically just a sounding board for a variety of video game topics. As it stands, we scholars still have a lot to learn about games and the games industry... but I'm hoping in a few years it'll mature into something worthwhile. After all, these scholars are pretty talented in their respective areas of expertise.
My contributions to the blog will largely be related to audio, since I was the only music/audio scholar this year. Check it out if you're interested.
-Sarah
I just barely finished my remix in time to submit it to Twestival. You can see other user submissions on the website, and a lot of people simply put piano chords under Imogen's voice (which is legit; the vocals lend themselves well to that kind of treatment). Instead, I went for using only Imogen's voice, similar to Dialect. Toward the end I got a little lazy and didn't have time to turn her consonants into drum beats. I also added a sawtooth wave to the low drone for some extra heft, although the drone is in fact still Heap's voice.
While making the remix I realized that the vocal material was very rhythmic, and it was hard to edit that persistent 95bpm out of the samples. As a result, the piece is less ambient/cloud-like than I originally envisioned.
That's exactly what I did today in the studio. I found out that Ableton Live version 6 and higher has video capabilities. Since I only have Live 5 I had to do the assignment (which has been overdue for a while) in the studios at school. Sorry for the crappy video quality, I blame Live :)
As Steven Stucky has said in class, a composer is really only ever faced with 2 problems: coming up with musical material, and then finding a way to use that material for longer than 30 seconds. If you want to make a piece quickly, you're going to need to optimize both of these steps.
One way of generating material is algorithmically and that's exactly what I did for the opening. I chose one of Live's midi arpeggiator and a marimba because let's face it, when anyone thinks of mars there's marimba. Unless you're Gustav Holst, then you think of lots and lots of brass. Which is what I put in next. I also threw crazy space reverb on top since that (for once) seemed appropriate. This piece might be the most cliche thing I've ever written :)
There's no actual melody to this piece, so it might sound a little empty. But it's the background music to the action anyway, so I think it does just fine. Also I didn't plan this but the intensity of the piece comes once the rover has already deployed its chute. Gives the video sort of a different interpretation (since normally I'd associate entering the atmosphere as the height of intensity).
