Sound in... My Apartment: Plans for a Quad experiment

The last couple of weeks have been truly bizarre. I was in college in 2008 during the Financial Crisis and thought it was one of the weirder and more momentous experiences I’d lived through. This moment has quickly leapfrogged 2008, and given how terrible this situation is for so many people, I’m very lucky to be in school yet again to participate in/observe how this all unfolds.

Still, it’s been difficult to focus on schoolwork during this first wave of changes to our lives, our world. Prior to going remote, I was very excited to experiment with a quad setup at school; moving from stereo to multichannel was what I signed up for! Going remote, worrying about family and friends, making major adjustments to lifestyle, and just reading the constantly shifting news has drained my motivation tank. So, this week’s assignment is basically a sketch, a set of plans for an experiment, but not what I would have liked to do in a more-normal world.

Idea:

I would like to make a p5 + tone.js sketch that functions like a spatialization test with a twist. I’ve never worked with quad, so this would be a helpful way to start to understand some of the “physics” of different audio setups. In short, the tool will play individual notes in the form of moving balls that, when played together, can form chords. The notes will play through different channels as they collide with the “speakers” on screen.

Here is a rough skeleton of the beginnings:

As I build this out, users will be able to:

• Arrange a multi-channel speaker setup on the canvas

  • The speakers will be rectangles with inputs to indicate the channel number

• Click to create notes visualized as balls that bounce around the screen

  • The balls carry a note that belongs to a particular key

  • The note is randomly chosen from the array of notes when created

    • Default will be to only choose 1,3,5,8 notes from the key to create a major chord

  • As the balls collide with the rectangles, the note associated with the ball plays through the channel associated with the speaker.

• Create many balls, increasing the chance of a chord playing through different speakers

• Use the the right or left arrow to change the key that the notes are drawn from.

• Use the up or down arrows to make balls move faster or slower

• Hit space to clear balls

Execution Plan

I started to wire up the sketch by creating objects for the balls and rectangles. I modified an earlier particle system sketch I made, and kept the system object, which may allow for some more features down the line. I haven’t connected tone yet, which is obviously the meat of this sketch. I plan on working on this over the next 2 weeks to make it work for the binaural assignment. The first set of things I need to to do:

• Finish collision detection between ball and rectangle

• Add tone.js to the html doc

• Hard- assign channels to each speaker

  • Once this work, allow input to assign channel

• When collision is detected, play a sound

  • Make sound draw from an array of possible sounds in a key

  • Create arrays for different keys

  • Allow key to be changed

• Connect slider to ball speed

• Re-configure keys/mouse presses to match a good UX

• Create volume slider and hook up to tone

Sound in Space Mono: Prepared Violin

Assignment:

Create sounds that play from a single (mono) output

Idea summary:

I created a “prepared violin” by attaching various resonant objects to the strings of my violin. The resulting sounds added new dimensions to the texture and harmonic quality of the traditional classical violin output. The violin itself is the mono output source.

Background:

This semester, we will be gradually building towards performing on a 40 channel setup. As we progress through increasingly more complex output arrangements, I will undoubtedly build up my understanding of technical tools like Max/MSP and get deeper into the weeds of DAWs like Ableton/Logic. For this first assignment, instead of jumping into those tools or arranging a piece of music, I wanted to start analog.

A mono output source can be anything from a single speaker to a single human voice. As a violinist for most of my waking life, albeit an infrequent one these days, I decided to use this assignment to dust off the strings and treat my violin as my mono output. Before diving into the details — one question to ponder: is the violin itself the mono output or is each string the mono output? The strings need some chamber in order to have their vibrations amplified enough to hear, so in this sense, I suppose the whole violin with its hollowed out body is the output source… But I’d love to hear the argument in favor of each-string-as-mono too!

Anyways. I wanted to try to experiment with the sounds my violin could produce. I used John Cage’s experiments with prepared pianos as inspiration. In his pieces, Cage placed different in/on the strings of his piano, completely altering their sonic properties. Sometimes strings were muted, instead lending a kind of percussive quality. Other times, the piano sounded like a distorted electronic instrument whose formats had been shifted. Could I get something similar from my violin?

Process:

Pianos are big, with enough space (and flatness) to stick a ping pong ball between strings. Violins are not big and are not flat between strings. Still, some objects would definitely still alter the properties of strings. I landed on 4 different experiments:

• a single safety pin,

• two safety pins (one small enough to clip around string, one large enough to cross two strings),

• a metal nail

• and a stripped electrical wire

Each of these objects did a couple of things — they changed the way the violin string vibrated and they also vibrated themselves. As a result, in each of the following videos, the violin produced novel sounds. The safety pins bounced and shifted as they vibrated; plucking strings to optimize for bouncing the safety pins led to the most interesting sounds. All of the objects produced interesting harmonics when they lightly touched the violin strings, however my favorite example is the wire. After wrapping the wire around the G-string, there was a bit of a handle that I could use to slide the wire up and down the string. You can hear the harmonics change as I slide the wire around.

I’ve included clips from each of the experiments below

Single safety pin:

Plucking Safety Pin

Two clothespins

Nail

Plucked nail

Wire

Next Steps:

While not every sound produced here is immediately appealing, all of them do have some unusual property that I could work into compositions. I’d like to record these into a sample bank and then apply audio effects to create some wholly new textures for use in a future piece of music, perhaps in the stereo assignment. Many of the electronic artists I enjoy listening to, from Aphex Twin to Flying Lotus, record their own analog sounds before manipulating them into the samples that sound so foreign; with my prepared violin experiments, I think I’ve found the beginnings of some interesting audio samples to use later.

Another interesting challenge that would keep me in the realm of mono performance: I could try to compose a piece using just my prepared violin. In this assignment, I looked for new sounds and textures without constraining myself around fitting these sounds into a composition. Getting these sounds to work in their raw form without digital manipulation would be a fun, albeit difficult, next experiment!

PComp Midterm: Liquid Sounds

Assignment: Create a project with interactivity that ideally uses serial communication between a microcontroller and computer. Daniel Fries and I collaborated on this assignment.

Idea: Daniel and I chose to collaborate together to build an instrument. Beyond knowing we wanted to make some sort of instrument, we entered the brainstorming phase with a pretty blank slate. Some recurring themes in our brainstorming included the concept of scrubbing through granules of sound, analog tape as either an aesthetic or as an actual mode of playback and playback controlled by walking in physical space. We knew we did not want any screens involved and wanted to make a very physical experience for the musician; we also wanted there to be a process of discovery for the musician to learn the affordances and nuances of the instrument. It would not need to be immediately apparent what produced sound, and what qualities of sound were possible.

We landed on using the idea of mixing liquids to control different parameters of sound. We imagined our users mixing cocktails with different outcomes depending on the particular proportions of spirits and mixers used— among other applications.

Process: Our initial plan was to place 3 glasses in a fabricated wooden enclosure and have a mixing bowl outside of the enclosure. We wanted to put load sensors under each glass/bowl to sense the amount of weight in each one, then program conditions that either changed sounds depending upon hitting particular thresholds of weight or conditions that changed continuously as weight changed.

We placed our order for 4 load sensors on Thursday. The assignment was due the following Wednesday and the sensors were supposed to arrive on Saturday. By Tuesday morning, we still did not have the sensors in-hand. Once we did get them, our worst-case scenario played out: the sensors did not behave as we had expected.

It turns out that 4 load sensors need to be used in-concert to form a Wheatstone Bridge circuit. We expected to be able to use just one load sensor to pull signal from the glass above it, even if that signal was only directionally correct. Once we discovered that this would not work, and it would be both time-and-cost prohibitive to make this approach work, we shifted to a different plan.

We had already fabricated our enclosure and written pseudocode before the sensors arrived; we needed a suitable alternative for the load sensor. Luckily, it turns out Force Sensing Resistors can pick up something akin to weight; and given that we only needed a directional reading, they were a fine alternative. We borrowed FSRs from classmates, soldered longer wires to them, and tested different setups with our enclosures to make sure they could pick up signal as our glasses filled with liquid.

Once we got them working well enough around 9:30pm, we switched to turning our pseudocode to real code in Tone.js. Daniel had experience writing musical instruments in Tone.js; although our initial plan was for me to drive the code section so that I could ramp up my skills, we ultimately had to have Daniel take more control (although we still sat together and talked through all of the code during the process) for the sake of time.

Reflections:

At the end of the day, our instrument worked and drew good responses from users who got to listen to + play the instrument. However, if we had our hands on sensors sooner, we could have finished a working prototype in time to work through details in the enclosure and the sound generation to make this a truly interesting musical device that we could continue to perform with. We’ll take that as a learning lesson moving forward in our physical computing projects.

10 Years of Waves

I recently found some music that I made in college, including the very first tracks I ever made. This academic year will mark 10 years since I graduated— it’s a good time to look back at who I was and who I’ve become. For this project, we were asked to use a color palette of 6 colors to represent ourselves and create compositions with just those colors. For the work below, I used the first 10 seconds of each of the 6 early songs that I found and visualized those as wave forms. I applied color to those waveforms and then placed them on a black canvas with white text of the number 10. I sized the waveforms differently and zoomed in close to the waveform to obscure the number 10 and create compositions that sometimes skewed each/any of the components of the image.

Below the gallery, I included the image of the full canvas. Note: when actually creating the compositions, I sometimes moved/deleted waveforms and the numbers, so what’s on this canvas now is not how it was set up for the compositions.

If you want to hear any of the tracks used for this piece (and maybe try to match the track to the composition), here is a private Soundcloud link.