Rough Interlude Study, Week 4

Howdy,

Week 4 has come and passed with many hours of coding modules, manipulating sound, and arranging abstract clips. The demo video can be seen below, or at this link.

Coding, delays and loops

Coding for this week revolved around delay: I set off with an aspiration to create a simple sub-1-second delay with all your average delay controls, as up until now I have been using my delay-looper for all my delay needs; which isnt a terrible delay scenario, but that thing is overkill for most delay cases, and it doesnt create fun wobbling pitch artifacts when the delay time is changed. So, delay-simple was born within a few hours and works flawlessly. What didnt take a few hours was my tapeloop module, which I was working on throughout most of the week, a terribly complex and absurdly beautiful module which I might say is one of my proudest achievements when it comes to pure data coding. 

What I wanted to achieve with this module was (fairly) simple: a tapeloop like audio buffer, one that your able to play slower or quicker therefore adjusting the pitch, and record audio onto. However, the catch is that when you record audio at a quicker speed, its both slower and pitched down when the playback speed returns to normal. This was incredibly hard to code in pure data. But I did it. I will explain further the processes and methods it uses, and about my coding practice in general;,,, Sometime in the future...        but for now I will just leave the screenshot images of the modules. of which can be seen displacing this paragraph, and apologies to mobile users as this website is terribly coded for smaller portrait screens. ill get onto this at somepoint but for now, university projects take focus

Sound, more slow piano manipulation

Sound this week was very much based off the tapeloop module: taking piano snippets from last week and processing and degrading through code and effects, then through my sp404 sampler, then through more effects. Once I had collected and mangled enough sound I arranged bits and pieces into a short composition similar to that of 'noonbell' from week 1 titled 'stereo attic pt 2.', which you can hear alongside other selections of sound in the demo, all of which revolve around one piano loop which i was particularly drawn to, so it does get a bit repetitive.                                                     n

Overworking and needing rest..........................................................

I'm going to leave my writing there this week, shorter than previous weeks but I just dont have the energy to do anything more fully featured right now. Over the past 4 weeks I have been progressively pushing myself harder and harder, climaxing in extreme fatigue, panic, depression, and terror since Thursday. While I will continue pushing, I need to stop and rest more; expect a bit less of myself

I have been listening to sound collage this week, at least when I feel up to listening to music. More modern sound collage, I intend to go back to 50s-70s and see what those eras have to offer, but I have enjoyed listening to artists like negativeland and matmos who the internet claim are good examples of this genre but I'm skeptical and look to dig further, as they all seem very much attempting a similar sound which I've known the books to do very well; for the purposes of this project and my own interest, however, I want to look to sound collage which might be much more abstract, less beat driven. Also I want to find less focus on vocals and word samples, more manipulation of sound, and other probably highly specific criteria which i intend to hold to all music I listen to .

Until next time,

Lou