AA2 - Semester 4 - Week 10

Ambience sound.
At the moment I am writing this, my game is not yet approved; and it does not have ambient sound! Thus, I will imagine an ambience with some relevance to the game.
Since the game goes on in a relatively "creepy" environment, I have come up with a background in this kind of a sequence:
- The main character is running to find someone in the dark night; a tiny alley. Location: eastern Los Angeles!and
- The main character is under heavy influence of drugs. His tourturers have put him in a chamber. He is totally tripping!This is my concept of a game like The Godfather (by Electronic Arts). I read about it last night actually! It sounds pretty cool.

DOWNLOAD THE 2-PART MP3.

References:
- Christian Haines. "Audio Arts: Semester 4, Weeks 10." Lecture presented at the EMU, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 15/10/2008.
- The Godfather, The Game. Wikipedia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Godfather:_The_Game) [Accessed 18/10/08]

CC2 - Semester 4 - Week 9

FFT

The basics and the technical characteristics of Fast Fourier Transform "thing" aside, it is a useful tool. This is my main interest.
This week's exercise was to utilise FTT in a device and it was recommended to have a look at the final project.
My final project is kind-of a mixer; hence the interface of this week's patch -and also its function really!-.
This patch which I have called the "Self Manipulator" takes a sample in its buffer, and using groove~ and one of the examples of FFT, provides additional "deformed" soundwaves which accompanying the original sample, sounds good -to me at least-.
As I mentioned, most of my attention was the applications of FFT, rather than what happens within the process. I will probably include this patch somewhere in my final project.
Note: It seems that some of the FFT examples' addresses should be allocated in Max. FFT convolution~ did not work until I manually added its address to the file preferences option. (how do you say it in proper English?)

DOWNLOAD THE PATCH

Cheers.

References:
- Christian Haines 'Creative Computing 2.2' Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 16/10/2008
- Max MSP, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max/MSP) [Accessed 18/10/2008]

CC2 - Semester 4 - Week 8

This week’s exercise was simple; get the Novation ReMOTE SL to control a sampler.
I ended up using 7 controllers: 5 knobs (or pots), 2 buttons and 1 slider.
The interesting challenge was the GUI. The more it goes, the more sophisticated I think about the interfaces I come up with, and of course the more “bugs” I gotta fix!
Nevertheless, MSP still seems easier than Max; it is relatively end of this semester and if MSP was hard, it should have shown itself by now; or maybe I am just taking it super-easy?
Back to the point of GUI, I actually incorporated some funny thing this week. There is a Mute button (see the picture, above the Volume Control) and when it is muted, the box changes to “unmute” and starts blinking; not regular blinking though, it actually changes colours from black to red in a pretty smooth fashion. I liked this part the most to be honest!
This patch and the one I did –I think- in week 6 will be good tools for me and my some-time-I-would-start project of music collage.
Nice!

HERE is the ZIP file of this weeks exercise.

Note: don’t bother with the name of this patch; I thought it was week 9. In fact, it IS week 9, but we are 1 week behind or something I think…

References:
- Christian Haines 'Creative Computing 2.2' Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 09/10/2008
- Max MSP, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max/MSP) [Accessed 11/10/2008]

I have not been posting anything since ages ago:
Just about the AA part: On week 7 we had this team project which I think did not go really "teamly". In fact, it was really just Freddie, to a big extent Edward and to some extent Doug who actually gave importance to the exercise. I just failed to cooperate in a good way. The final result ended up in being far from what I had in mind. no complaints though, I really appreciate what others did; what I am saying is that 'team work' does not seem to be working for me.

AA2 - Semester 4 - Week 9

SciFi & Horror films; the crystallisations of "All the things I hate".

The exercise was to take 4 sounds from the game which we plan to do for the project and modify them according to the principles of readings (a) and (b) mentioned in the footnotes.
I have not yet finished the proposal sheet, so the game is not really approved but as far as I am concerned, this is what I want to do and if nothing changes, yeah here we go..

In the game, some "father" hits others with a baseball bat. I changed one sound which I had downloaded from freesound.org and compressed and equalised it. The result is the first part of the final MP3.

This father dude will eventually kill some chicks; hence the screaming sound. Honestly I found the original sound in the game pretty low-quality. Yet again freesound.org, compression, fade-in and fade-out,.. etc; 2nd part of the MP3.

the "bad guys" of the game are sometimes dogs, and they growl. This was pretty tricky 'cause I had to shift the pitch and stretch the time; 3rd part of the MP3.
The 4th part probably took the longest time to finish. As you can see in the picture, I quadropled the initial sound (glass breaking, also from freesounds.org) and changed the pitch of the 3rd and 4th part, panned them, compressed them and basically did so much to the poor sample.

By the way, all were done in Audacity; challenges: zero.

Downloadables:
1: the ORIGINAL sounds in order.
2: the MODIFIED sounds in order.

References:
- Christian Haines. "Audio Arts: Semester 4, Weeks 9." Lecture presented at the EMU, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 08/10/2008.

Readings:
(a) : "Chapter 5 - Sound Design: Basic Tools and Techniques" and "Chapter 6 - Advanced
Tools and Techniques". Childs, G. W. 2006, Creating Music and Sound for Games, Thomson Course Technology.

(b) : Kelleghan, Fiona. 1996, Sound Effects in SF and Horror Films, 2006,
.