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,
.

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.

CC2 - Semester 4 - Week 4

Ring Modulation / Amplitude Modulation.

Having worked with a number of electronic music softwares, I did not have much difficulty to actually "understand" the concepts of Ring Modulation (RM) and amplitude Modulation (AM). On the other hand, I personally think after the use of "Low Pass Filter" -with a reasonable amount of resonance-, RM and AM are the most widely used synthesis in these days' electronic music.
Coming up with the patch however, was not that easy at the beginning. I was never exposed to actually "calculate" the amount of RM and AM I was using; if it sounds good, it is good. Nevertheless, the insight of the whole procedure was pretty interesting.The most annoying thing in working with Max/MSP -at least for me- so far is when I use a shortcut (usually the space bar) to turn the device on and off... Not to make a confusion when there actually is a "mute" button provided, is a hard task; or probably a hard task for someone like me.
The stuff we have to make are becoming fancier, there might in fact be a possibility of getting some sort of a job with one of these Audio Technology companies (I'd love to work with Propellerhead!)


References:
- Christian Haines 'Creative Computing 2.2' Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 21/08/2008
- Max MSP, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max/MSP) [Accessed 26/8/2008]

Forum - Semester 4 - Week 3

First Year Students' Presentations

It was a good feeling looking at the works of some people creating music under the same consequences as we were last year. Their perceptions and motives were more or less the same, so were the expectations. Nevertheless, as the nature of music and particularly Musique concrète (the genre in which most of the students were presenting their works) once again we got acquainted with new ideas, approaches, concepts and perceptions; great for me.
Funny enough, the first year students sound like thinking the same way that we (at least I) used to last year, and I assume that they would project the same change and evolution of ideas as they continue; if!
I won't go through each piece; my main interest is the overall change -of attitude- in them, us, and others. Like always there was this big subject of "what is music" which I am tired of touching again; however, the good news is that it seems like the appreciation for avant-garde art -in this case Musique concrète- is growing. I guess we would have a huge leap in the amount of knowledge we gain in uni if we had more subjects on for example something like this:
"How to Recognise, Deal with, Appreciate and Like Something New which Might Look Unattractive us at First”...

References:
Stephen Whittington. "Music Technology Forum - Week 3 - First Year Student Presentations." Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 14/08/2008.

CC2 - Semester 4 - Week 3

Polyphony and Instancing

Using Poly~ was not much difficult in terms of designing the patch, nor was the actual understanding of the concept of a polyphonic device. What was new -and interesting- for me, was that having worked with softwares who had embedded this technology in them already (Reason, Live, Protools, etc..) I could kind of realise what was going on behind the scenes. In fact, I guess it would make more sense if I "rewired" Max and these softwares and come up with something more exclusive to me.
What I chose to polyphonies, was my last week's patch which was generating signals using a "cycle~" object and ramping its volume from full scale (100) to minimum (0).
I made a device that gets 5 inputs and constantly ramps their volume up and down in period of 2 seconds. The result is actually pretty nice! I set the device to divide each individual volume by 5 so the overall doesn't clip.
I also provided an octave changer (basically to look fancier and more like real-world control surfaces.I might have done something wrong or insufficient but I had this feeling that something was not done at the end! Maybe I am too lucky with MSP or I am so stupid I don't understand the objectives!

Listen to the file here: http://www.box.net/shared/ded9f65v73

References:
- Christian Haines 'Creative Computing 2.1' Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 14/08/2008
- Max MSP, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max/MSP) [Accessed 19/8/2008]

Forum - Semester 4 - Week 2

This week's Forum session "My Favourite Things" was presented by David Harris.
David talked about his collaboration with the quartet Grainger in a three-concert series in 2008.
For some reason -which I didn't really understand- we were ought to follow the scores for the pieces; I lost both music and the scores at the end though.
His composition "Terra Rapta (Stolen Land)" was a piece dedicated to the story of the stolen generation of Australian Aboriginals (or maybe to the individuals themselves,..) which I found well-sounding; yet, not one of my "Favourite Things"...
David’s approach to naming his work was pretty interesting for me. Why Latin, exactly? I have the same issue too, when I want to name my tunes, I tend to come up with something as weird as possible but at the same time I can just think of simple things. Is the best way the use of non-English languages?
Following that, he played another piece of the concert series originally by Schubert which -as far as I observed- bored a considerable number of Music Tech students; a phenomenon which made Stephen comment on David's intentions as "provocative".
I have referenced to some stuff about Harris’ concert that I found on the internet.

https://www.qtix.com.au/show/Grainger_Quartet_Darkness_Light_08.aspx
http://www.graingerquartet.com/

References:
David Harris. "Music Technology Forum - Week 2 - My Favourite Things." Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 07/08/2008.

CC2 - Semester 4 - Week 2

Switching and Routing signals.

Most of my time this week was spent of providing help files for last week’s exercises. Still, I have issues understanding the fundamental differences of Max and MSP; however, I hope –and it seems like- there are not much basic dissimilarities in the logics and the application of various algorithms.

The three parts of this week’s exercise were:

a) Adding mute function to previous objects.

b) “GUIise[1]”ing the previous objects.

c) Creating two signal generators utilising Cycle~ and Phasor~.

Worthy to discuss, for the third part, I opted to merge Cycle~ and Phasor~[2]; forming a patcher with 3 parts: a Cycle~, a Phasor~ and a combination of these two, which works on the basis of having the Cycle~ generating the sound and the Phasor~ modifying it. The 3^rd part is signified in the picture since I crafted it in OS platform.

Probably the most notable issue that I faced, was the noise which the objects Cycle~ and Phasor~ made when the phases of their generated waves were changing. I tried several ways to eliminate this noise but since you can not connect a number~ to any of the phase inlets, you would definitely get the noise of dealing with –relatively- low bit rate of number (and not a number~) object.

References:
- Christian Haines 'Creative Computing 2.1' Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 7/08/2008
- Max MSP, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max/MSP) [Accessed 11/8/2008]

Post Script: Mistakenly, the ZIP file in the Box.net widget is labeled Sanad CC2 Week 4. Week 2 is correct, the contents of the ZIP file are all right though.

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[1] GUIise = Create Graphical User Interface version of something.

[2] Believe it or not, I spent almost two hours searching for some object called “Rasor~”!

AA2 - Semester 4 - Week 2

Game Sound Analysis: Need for Speed; High Stakes (1999).

This racing game is based on the idea of running away from the police[1] listening to heavy metal music; hence the sounds of sirens, police helicopters, etc (which were new to the series of NFS games).

Much attention is paid to the detailed sounds and noises of the cars including their engine, their breaks, other parts of car bodies, etc.. Other cars also sound with respect to their position (left, right and in surround systems in front and back) in relation to the players(’) car(s). Most of the sounds can be categorised as hyper-real.

Another aspect of the sound in this game is its theme music; like many other themes in this time period (and beyond), there would be no pause in the music if the player paused the game; there are (even more than) two separated layers of sound going on at the same time. However, when the game completely changes the scene (eg. from “playing” to “choosing a car”) the music changes as well as all other effects, indicating the entrance to a new environment.

Not much narration in this game, except for policemen talking on their walkie-talkies.

(Video reference: seconds 6 to 51)

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[1] It’s much more pleasant to me than kill-kill-kill games highly regarded as the sources of development in the game industry.

References:
- Christian Haines. "Audio Arts: Semester 4, Weeks 2." Lecture presented at the EMU, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 05/08/2008.

Forum - Semester 4 - Week 1

Audio / Music listening Culture (or why people are listening to what they are listening to and why they do it the way they do it!)
The evolution of music technology has had its significant impacts on the way music is perceived by public. The topic of this session was the pros and cons of this phenomenon.
According to Stephen, Walkman -as a symbol of this revolutionary change- has acted as a device to provide a "movie soundtrack" for "people's lives"; however, I personally often wonder (for example) "... how bizarre it is that walking in streets at 2 o'clock after midnight is accompanied by some psytrance music"! maybe my life doesn't have a conventional soundtrack.Other opinions which popped-up suggested ideas such as "headphones have provided an extent of isolation-from-outside-world", "technology has increased the quantity of listening to music and has decreased its quality", etc...
Like many forum sessions, discussions eventually went all over the place and a whole lot of various issues arose again; my problem is that noone seems to comment on anything respecting the fact of these issues being "subjective". Because something on Triple J has become famous doesn't mean that "Radio is the way..." or such judgements. I think things radically differ in different places; if we are to observe these issues, we need to have a more open mindset and avoid issuing transcriptions for the entire globe; especially when our personal experiences are limited to few communities.

Stephen Whittington. "Music Technology Forum - Week 11 - Audio Culture." Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 31/07/2008.