CC2 - Semester 4 - Week 7

Record and Play.

Pretty easy exercise. There was basically a player (for which I was initially intending to use play~ but ended up using groove~) and a recorder. Obviously enough, there was a necessity to utilise buffer~ in both, reading from and writing to it.Aside these three elements, the object "waveform~" played a significant role in my patches. I did not find the whole "story" behind this object necessarily interesting; however, paying attention to the mindset of a "typical" user (i.e. commercialised enough to be impressed by the interface more than the usage of any given device) I think it is a really "fancy" object. In general, having some sort of visual element help a lot to "sell" the product; some marketing things anyway...

PS: Listen to Shulman. For a while please forget about Max/MSP and have some good chillout music in your ears please...

Download the patches here or go to the box in the right side.

References:
- Christian Haines 'Creative Computing 2.2' Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 11/09/2008
- Max MSP, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max/MSP) [Accessed 12/9/2008]

Forum - Semester 4 - Week 7

Presentations

This week was “our” chance to present what we had done. Like always, I did something the very last minute and played the tune in the forum; a 6/8 dance tune in which I had incorporated the use of Max, REASON, and other stuff. I thought of the track as pretty bad but apparently it was not as awful as I thought. I leave the rest of the feedbacks to other blogs of other students..Edward presented his work of last semester in Max. Despite the fact that there was no sound, I liked his idea of associating vision and sound. Unfortunately there would be no more Pink Floyd concerts (Richard Wright passed away) but if there were anything similar, I think Edward can potentially take a role in that.
Freddie and Doug also presented their Max projects. Finally seeing Freddie’s controversial patch –controversial because of the use of boobs! In the patch- was pretty nice; again it was the idea rather than the process, which fascinated me more.
In my opinion, Doug with his patch projected the most practical –or pragmatic- approach; he actually built up something that can be used to educate people! Yet again the issues with sound and computers stood on his way and he had to deal with some unexpected problems to show his work.


Rooster. Walls of The Wild. http://www.wallsofthewild.com/rooster.htm (Accessed 14/9/08)
Stephen Whittington. "Music Technology Forum - Week 6 - Negativland." Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 11/09/2008.

CC2 - Semester 4 - Week 6

Wave player basic

Using objects such as groove~ and wave~, I built a patch for playing up to 16 sound (being files such as .wav, .aif, etc –and not MP3-).

The sweetest part for me –of course- was to manipulate the samples’ playback using a –relatively- simple trick of a slider.

The other interesting issue was when I chose to use another slider to determine the starting and ending points of the loop with just dragging the mouse on the slider.

I still am not sure if it is the best way for a poly~ patch to pop-up different windows and work with each separately. I assume as long as the number of sounds –or parts in any poly~- is reasonably low (say less than 20) it would not get messy; however, although even with big numbers (imagine the poly~ patch deals with 200 windows) can run smoothly, I think there would be a need of two or three monitors to see what is going on.

Overall, the more MSP goes forward, the easier and the more time-consuming it becomes; ain’t it?[1]

Download: http://www.box.net/shared/0593ce74m6

References:
- Christian Haines 'Creative Computing 2.2' Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 04/09/2008
- Max MSP, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max/MSP) [Accessed 5/9/2008]

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[1] I just watched this fantastic film called Daytime Robbery and “ain’t it” is stuck in my mind; I had to use it, sorry…

Forum - Semester 4 - Week 6

What would you feel like if you heard this?

9 sounds, 9 emotions; maybe 9 lives too. The "objective" was to listen to 9 sounds each representing a particular emotion. The point was that each individual playing the sounds -or rather who has chosen the sounds- has had a different perception of each sound. In simpler English the way different people perceive different sounds is unlikely to be 100% identical; and we examined it.
Like most of the times I had not done my job and again like most of the times I opted to improvise (bloody self-confidence!)which according to Stephen turned out to be a dodgy experiment. Let's say it failed, which by itself is a valid result for an experiment.
Anyway, what I did was to speak in a language unknown to the rest of the class; Persian. I tried my best to embed emotions and deliver my message via the tonal projection of whatr I was saying. Surprisingly, it actually worked few times; which would possibly confirm the justification of such experiment. Back to the main issue, the "sound-and-feeling-testing"; the idea was apparently derived from the Indian perception and sacredness of sounds. I personally -as a materialist- am not sure if such definitions of sound and imagining "souls" for sounds would make sense or not but I admit that there definitely is "something" about the effects of sounds on us; probably music therapists know much more about this.
Isn't music therapy a relatively new-born idea? How about discussing that in forum?

References:

Saraswati, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saraswati (Accessed 8/9/8)

Stephen Whittington. "Music Technology Forum - Week 6 - Negativland." Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 04/09/2008.

AA2 - Semester 4 - Week 6

CC2 - Semester 4 - Week 5

FM Synthesis

For this week, I undertook another approach to designing my device;
Since -like other exercises- one criteria was to have the "poly~" option embedded in the patch, and also as a result of each individual voice needing separate modifications, I chose to come up with a "multiple-parts" patch. The patch would initially ask the user for some basic settings (i.e. MIDI input, number of voices, etc..) and the user would specify the particular characteristics of each voice afterwards.
Yet again, my biggest issue was the incompatibility of MAX withing the contexts of OSX and PC. This software is simply NOT CROSS-PLATFORM. Nevertheless, like most of the other times, I opt to finalise my patch in OSX.
This patch will provide the user with the option to have the frequency, the modulation rate and the modulation depth canging over time; with the use of envelopes.

References:
- Christian Haines 'Creative Computing 2.2' Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 28/08/2008
- Max MSP, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max/MSP) [Accessed 31/8/2008]

Forum - Semester 4 - Week 5

Negativland.

Stephen's favourite thing was a video of an "anti-copyright and stuff!" group called Negativland.
Everyone else in his blog is writing about who they are, so as a bit of difference, I will focus on what I got out of getting acquainted with these people. The most "crucial" and -since Stephen likes to use this word- "provocative" aspects of the video was that apparently many people would get "offended" by seeing their heros, being actors, singers, politicians, or prophets being teased and satirised. There is a long story -certainly more than 200 words- about why and how people are not tolerant, and this is directly related to the Negativelad. However, I hereby admit that it needs a lot of guts to challenge people's perceptions and manipulate the way they want to portrait their beliefs.
The Negativeland's work titled "Christianity is Stupid" was apparently the most controversial part of their works. In my personal opinion, it actually was a pretty weak work of art; but the name and the refrain "Communism is Good" (which was also pretty comic) caused the offence and controversy. I think of their way of expressing their opinions as similar as Richard Dawkins; good ideas, bad -or rather agressive- projection.
Anyway,.. Stephen's "provocative" favourite thing was pretty nice, a bit surprising too...
PS: Negativland has a lot more in the sense of music and art; but I just chose to talk about this aspect of their works...

References:
Stephen Whittington. "Music Technology Forum - Week 5 - Negativland." Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 28/08/2008.

AA2 - Semester 4 - Week 5

Designing sound for game; first practical step.

This week's story is about a software introduced to us by Christian. FMOD Designer is one of the first steps of ours towards manipulating the sounds and preparing them for a game. For the first part, we just tested few basic functions of the software and observed the outcome.

Most of what I did for this was basically to get acquainted with the way the software is programmed to organise stuff (i.e. sound files in various formats of WAV, MP3, AIFF, etc...)
Probably because of my zero familiarity with this field and my lack of previous experience in this, I had a bit of work to realise what was going on. In reality, it was not very complex; the interface gave me the impression of working with my files in Microsoft Windows explorer and organising them in that way. Nevertheless, -very much like Firefox indeed- the software follows the principle of window-in-window or tab-in-windows.
The only thing that I could not get to work was to make the software play the sounds I had defined for it to play; I had to play the result of the manipulation manually.

the MP3 is right in the box in the right side, or HERE..

References:
- Christian Haines. "Audio Arts: Semester 4, Weeks 4." Lecture presented at the EMU, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 26/08/2008.