Week 7
- Practical 1 - Audio Arts
- Practical 2 - Creative Computing -Supercollider FM/AM/SynthDef's [1]
FM
Ah good old Supercollider; Another week of programming that for some reason I’m not entirely into at the moment. I’m sure that if I really spent the extra time on it I would learn to love it, but for some reason I haven’t the motivation to do any extra other than skimming over the week's readings.
This week we learnt how to record audio from Supercollider into a file for use in other audio applications. We also looked at some of the different noise ugens that are available. The one that really caught my ear was the dust ugen. This ugen is great for trigger type processes because of its sporadically sharp wave peaks, but even as an audio source it creates some excellent sounds.
The reading contained the same things we went through in class, but also touched upon mouse control assignment (x/y movement mapping), voltage control synthesis, vibrato, and envelopes.
This week we mostly went throught formatting and commenting conventions, and the related radings were mostly revision (explaining the same sort of things in a different way), which was helpful I guess. I remember last year I didn't have a problem getting my head around Max/MSP, but I can't say the same about Supercollider. This week we mostly went through formatting and commenting conventions, and the related readings were mostly revision (explaining the same sort of things in a different way), which was helpful I guess. I remember last year I didn't have a problem getting my head around Max/MSP, but I can't say the same about Supercollider. This is probably largely due to the fact that I'm spending half the time on Supercollider this year as what I did with Max last year. Instead of reflecting on Supercollider every week, I think it would be more productive (for me at least) if I were given some programming tasks that needed to be solved and submitted every week. Something similar to the tasks we were set last year for Max. I find putting all the theory to practice really helps. Unfortunately so far it's (mostly) all been about learning the theory, and not the practice, which i'm hoping will change soon.
For this workshop we listened to John Cage's Music for Carillion (1954), William's Mix (1952), and 101 (1989). Each piece was quite diverse in instrumentation, and once again they reminded me of Cage's versatility as a composer. The one thing I admire about John Cage, is his ability to write experimental music that doesn’t just sound like an intellectual experiment, although I can't say this about all his pieces. Out of all three of the pieces, I would have to say "101" was my favourite. To me it wasn't just ambience, but ambience that contained a journey full on interest. It reminded me
of the ambience heard in the original Silent Hill for Playstation as the player character walked the misty streets of Silent Hill (check out the picture).