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

Imogen Heap Remix

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.

The Song That Never Was (Imogen Heap Remix) by esbie

In other news, our 3rd major work was due in my composition class today. Unfortunately I didn't really like mine this time around, so I'm forgoing the usual SoundCloud post. Better luck next time.

Composing for video in 90 minutes

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).