Snowboard Kids

I must have gotten a little nostalgic, because last weekend I sat down and re-instrumented the Big Snowman track of Snowboard Kids from start to finish. This is one of my favorite tracks of the game.

Big Snowman by esbie

I used mp3s from this ringtone website for reference.

I originally wanted to give some SBK tracks a more updated 2010 trance feel, but Big Snowman just veered towards being wildly orchestral, so I went with that. I tried to make the instrumentation as realistic as possible, but even skilled violin sections would probably have trouble playing arpeggiated 16th notes at 130bpm. Also towards the end I got lazy and didn't add in woodwind, low brass, and percussion parts. Oh well, maybe next time.

Tenderoni Remix

Tenderoni Remix by esbie

Kele is coming out with a new album on the 21st, and so is holding a remix contest of his single, Tenderoni.

This was a 100% Audacity/Cubase endeavor for me; I didn't bother using any outside samples either. As a result this remix ended up very very similar to the original. My only complaint is I wish they had handed out stems without fx... When you're trying to add reverb on a track that has its own reverb baked in, things get weird pretty fast.

A little something from MUNI

A couple months ago (during the Chinese parade if I remember right) I recorded the very strange sound that the trolley tracks in San Francisco make. The recording is dirty, lots of people talking etc. But I did my best to clean it up anyway and turn it into a piece of sorts.

Trolley through Quartz by esbie

Some Solid APC Action

Good evening! (or I guess it's early morning already on the east coast :) last weekend I composed a song using my new Atari Punk Console. Behold!

Bought this APC off ebay from the very awesome ProperBoy, who sells all sorts of analog goodies.  Here's the song:

Come Find Her  by  esbie

My first stab using the APC as a compositional element was trying to sound edgy and sophisticated, but ended up sounding more creepy than anything else :P Two things that would really make work with the APC easier are

1. a gating mechanism. Right now the unit is really only capable of creating one loooooong note, haha
2. a midi to control voltage converter... or possibly, as properboy suggested, an analog step sequencer

Basically my problems boil down to the fact that all my gear is digital, which doesn't always play nice with analog. Which is a shame, because I'm really loving the glitchy things analog can do.

Timelapse Workspace

Been dying to post *something*, even though all the projects I'm working on (a song using my new APC, a game prototype using GameQuery) aren't complete yet. So I thought I'd quickly show you my new setup in the living room, where I'm doing most of my work.

My camera gave up after 30 mins of recording because my 4gb mem card ran out of space (lol), so we'll see whether or not video recording myself becomes a trend.

Oh, and the music is a reject of mine that never made it to SoundCloud :P

It's still winter, but at least I have Cubase!

Happy Belated New Years!

I tried to write some music over the holidays and was totally creatively blocked. Partly because I was busy coding the video editor that palm demo'd at CES (minute 30 of this very long video if you're curious), but also the stuff I tried to compose was just coming out... not right.

Clearly this means I need more gear.

So I bought a lexicon USB preamp. Not because I like Lexicon, but because it was one of the cheapest preamps on amazon, and it came with Cubase LE4. Cubase is my DAW of choice, so this seemed like a nice, inexpensive way to get a copy.

I also bought an analog synth from ebay: my first analog synth ever! But I'm still waiting for some cables from Sweetwater before I can play it, so more on that next time.

So I wrote this in Cubase, using some samples I had taken in Ithaca of me stepping on the ice-covered sidewalk to my apartment. The instruments are from Reason, as usual, but this time I thought I'd try the Thor patch. Usually I head straight for the NN-XT.

winter solstice phoenix hatching  by  esbie

I considered creating a whole song out of this with bells, drums, etc but

1. I didn't want to ruin a good thing haha. And
2. soundcloud is now limiting user accounts by hours of content (BOOOOOO) and I only have an hour left to use on my account ^_^;;

Alright that's it for now!

Reason Season!

So I finally got around to sampling that music box I got a while back. Eventually I plan to dissect it and torture some more unique sounds out of it, but for now I did the basics and now I have a virtual musicbox to play with. I arranged all the samples in an NN-XT in Reason, and posted it up on ReasonStation... so if you use Reason and want a musicbox, go there and download it for free! I didn't wrap it up into its own refill because I'm lazy (maybe one of you can do that for me ^_^)

I used that Reason instrument in this next song, although it's impossible to tell because it's so subtle. At any rate, this was a song I've been singing in the shower a lot, and let me tell you it's hard to sing chordal progressions with yourself. Hence I figured I'd compose it out in Reason. The song is sorta cheesy, but that's part of its charm, haha.

Respite  by  esbie

Philip Glass meets Lord of the Rings! That's what I think it sounds like anyways.

Click Tracks, Awesome Mashup, and More

Learned my lesson the other day that any on-the-fly recording I do should either be done with a click track or edited in Abelton Live (Live has a fantastic warp tool) afterwards. Otherwise the tempo just goes everywhere. Still posting this just for posterity:

Kitchen Song of Storms by esbie

A while ago, Phil and I made a papercraft keyboard cat. Pic below and the instructions are online here

Btw, the keyboard cat you see here is chillin' in Phil's new Paul Mccobb dresser thing.

I'm going to be entering yet ANOTHER remix contest, this time for Little Boots' "Earthquake". So, while I was downloading all the stems (unrelated: why on earth did they split up the stems by stereo left/right but not by individual instruments? how annoying ~_~) I was listening the the electric guitars and realized that it the chord progression was eerily similar to a very famous song... can you guess? Here's the elecguitar stem:
Elecguitars RIGHT by LittleBoots
Any theories? Well, fastforward 5 hours and I went from the elecguitars stem to this!
Earthquake vs. Otherside Remix by esbie
Red Hot Chili Peppers FTW. Turns out the two songs are only 2 semitones away from eachother, so I warped, transposed, and edited it all in Ableton. Matching tempos was actually not an easy feat... it's now obvious to me that RHCPs don't use click tracks either ^_^;;

This mashup was also difficult because I only had stems for one of the songs (Earthquake, naturally) and so that forced me to use all of Otherside's voicings. Since both tracks have a lot of bass, I had to make sure only one bassist was playing at a time.

Unfortunately I won't be submitting this remix to the contest because of inherent copyright issues (sry, you can't dl this remix from the soundcloud player either), but it sure was fun to make!

APE + Roomba

Last weekend I went to the Alternative Press Expo 2009, where I got to see lots of indie comic book artists showing off their stuff. Way cool.

Also, I shot a video of my roomba, since my mom was curious about it

Tricky Tricky Remix Completion!

I like Royksopp's music, so their remix contest was a total 'yes please, sign me up'. The original track is called Tricky Tricky and you can listen/download it on Soundcloud. My remix turned out pretty eclectic and unfocused, but eh, music is music.

Tricky Tricky (Remix de Esbie) by esbie

Also: since I've only had this mac for a few months, this is the first time I've had to compose on it.  Let me just say that Logic Pro and I don't always see eye to eye, so this remix took longer than usual. Anyone have a DAW on mac that they know, love, and would recommend? I'm open to suggestions.

Some stuff I thought about while making it:

• The original has 2 different chord progressions, one major, one minor. If you take a hard look at the track stems they gave out for remixing, you'll find they never gave us the stuff in the major progression. That blows. The major progression was my favorite part. So you'll find I tried to do a lot of recreation of that section (ie, a lot of my remix is also major)
• I absolutely loved the synth lead that came with the track. I harmonized it, used it in different instruments, and transposed it into a major key.
• at 143bpm, Tricky Tricky was definitely a track that could be taken at half tempo. 
• Karin Deijer-Andersson's voice is awesome. In some parts I vocoded it and pitch shifted it. Although in retrospect I liked her original voice more :) The lyrics are not bad as far as lyrics go. And "over and over" is easy to exploit with musical word-painting
• I had to EQ the bass frequencies like crazy... too many of my samples had a lot of low end rumbling

If I could do it over again... I'd do an entirely acoustic version. Mostly because I added the violins towards the end and realized that was my favorite part. Ah well, maybe next time.

Basically Famous

Hey so if you haven't seen my facebook wall recently, my friend Jason Turer put up a trailer from a student film he produced a couple years back... and I'm in it! I'm playing a character named Mary who thinks her roommate is crazy for hearing weird noises at night. The best part of this is that Jason put the trailer on IMDB! Yes folks that's right, I'm now considered an actress on IMDB ^__^ do you think I should fill out my profile? (Although in all seriousness there are hundreds of Sarah Browns there). Go ahead and clickthrough to see the trailer on IMDB (oh and warning, it's a little cheesy :P)

Back from summer vacation

Hey! After an unusually long hiatus, I'm back and ready to blog. I'm coming to you from my new apartment in Sunnyvale, CA where I now work fulltime for Palm, making webOS media apps.

I was shopping in SF on Valencia the other day and I found this adorable music box where you can compose your own music (provided it's entirely in the key of C major). I promptly bought it and of course the first song I made with it is a zelda cover. enjoy ^_^

Goron Music Box by esbie

Something not technical

I was playing my mom's keyboard last week when I realized that I don't know any songs for piano. **Mary Had A Little Lamb does not count.** I took piano lessons for years and years when I was younger, yet here I am struggling to remember even a single song. I finally did remember a song, but was one I had written my freshman/sophomore year of college. Surprised that I remembered all the words, I thought I'd keep a record of it on soundcloud.

A Slow Release by esbie

I don't consider this a finished 'piece' because it lacks polish, but it's interesting if only because the song is so different from what I normally work on.

Ichigo Flock Simulation

These guys above are way fun to play with! (those of you in an RSS reader will probably have to click through.) Click on the stage for more boids.

I started this project with Phil a while back and have decided to stop working on it, at least for now. Ichigo was my introduction to programming in Actionscript 3.0 but also turned out to be my introduction to boid theory. Every boid above has several forces that influence its interactions, including:

• alignment: heading towards the mouse cursor
• cohesion: heading towards the center of the flock
• separation: maintaining ample distance from flockmates
• steerResistance: momentum that provides resistance to turning or stopping
• randomness: some slight randomization of their movements

Our codebase allows flocks to collect Collectables, avoid Obstacles, and even merge with other flocks (although the above demo doesn't show this functionality). Eventually I hope to add more support for dynamic sound generation via flock behavior as well. This was meant to be a game prototype, but as you can see, not a lot was implemented except for the core functionality :P

One of the trickier bits during the process was telling the boids which direction to face. Simply pointing them in the direction of their velocity vector resulted in boids that could instantaneously flip their faces from back to front or left to right. Not only did we end up interpolating the sprite's rotation, but we also programmed each boid so it begins to turn only if its new velocity vector is at least theta degrees away from its old velocity vector. This last adjustment resulted in more flock-like and fish-like behavior.

The public build is here, and the source code is of course up on github if you're curious.

I Made Minesweeper

The javascript version using jQuery. The playable alpha version is on github right now (fyi flags are draggable :P ). I'm waiting for the webOS sdk before I make anymore changes, because for the moment I've decided I want to code mobile games. Thank Chelsea for the sprites.

(Oh and please note I will take a two week hiatus from this blog while I'm out of the country :)

Welcome to the rest of my life

I'm done graduating. Except for the thank you notes, but let's be honest, those won't be going out for another 4 months. I'll be here, in Las Cruces, for another week before visiting China and then I'm off to a family reunion in North Dakota. After that it's Silicon Valley or bust.

I figured since I'll be traveling a lot I should jump on board the portable music bandwagon once again. I'll be outfitted with my gameboy, DS, and H2 Zoom, so I'm expecting some good things to come.

Recently I've been doing nothing but cleaning, so I took a break to compose something cute on LSDJ. Purpose of the exercise was to make use of some extended techniques including:

Slurs
Vibrato
Groove (Swing)
Drumkits (ok this isn't "extended" but I haven't used LSDJ's yet)

Perfectly Orange Boss by esbie

Zora, AIAC

I had nothing but final projects my last semester at Cornell, and my composition class was no exception. I had a tough time deciding what exactly to write, but I finally settled on using a song from Majora's Mask as part of my theme and worked from there. Specifically, I took the first 10 or so notes from the melody of this song and stretched them out over a longer timespan



We had our pieces performed by (mostly) faculty of the department in a quasi-concert. Below is the part of my piece that they were best able to play (which is also the main melody taken from MM):

Zora excerpt by esbie

There were a number of issues with the piece that prevented the players from performing better, chief among them the fact that the piece is in G# minor. Other problems included hard-to-read enharmonic spellings and rest rhythms. Also towards the end, the piano part becomes virtually impossible to play. You can check out the score to see what I mean (pdf).

If it were going to be performed again, these issues would be pretty easily remedied by rewriting the piece in a different key. Luckily midi doesn't have some of the problems human performers do, so I put a midi representation of the score if you're interested in hearing the piece in its entirety.

Zora, AIADC by esbie

Adventures in Processing

Finally, Chelsea's and my game is done! It's called Universe, and you can read more about it and download it from the Universe website. Once the source code is cleaner, I'll tell you more about the game itself. I did however, want to mention a few surprising things about Processing 1.0 that I learned.

I'd say the most annoying part of this project was the camera. It made much more sense from a game implementation perspective to rotate the camera instead of rotating each individual celestial body. But in order to rotate and translate the camera, Processing has to be in 3D opengl mode... which means the resulting shapes/images can't be antialiased (at least this is what Chelsea tells me). Huh.

Also to my surprise (though in retrospective it makes perfect sense), Processing is NOT meant for audio. Here I thought Processing was very geared towards audio/visual combinations and it is, as long as the combination is mostly visual. While I adore the audio library minim, and it's come a long way, I still couldn't find simple things...like a pitch shifter.

Some of my complaints stem from the fact that processing is still Java, and Java is far from ideal for game making. Lesson learned. Another things I don't like about processing is its IDE, which is fairly limited when compared with my Java IDE of choice, Eclipse. The good folks at Create Digital Music pointed out that there is an eclipse plugin, but I haven't checked it out yet, so maybe that's easier to use.

Now that I better understand what processing is capable of, I'd probably use again for either a) very simple/visual java applets (just for fun) or b) for the visual end of an audio project built in another program. Specifically I'm thinking a Max/MSP or PD patch with communication to processing via Open Sound Control could work wonders.

Procrastinating

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.

Petron by esbie

And now I'm back to writing real music (for my composition final project)

Could be Interesting

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