Music and Computing - Leo Sulzbacher - Creative Project

This is the overview of all files and parts of my Creative Project for the Music and Computing Lecture of Year 2024. Preferably use a Markdown Reader to view this document.

Introduction

Hi! I'm Leo, I'm 23 years old and studying CS at the FH Münster. I love making music in my free time especially ambient, IDM (Interesting Dance Music - a term coined by Aphex Twin) and Techno.

In this Document I will guide you through my process of making an homage to the song "Winona" using all kinds of tricks and techniques I learned during this lecture, maybe even more sometimes. I hope you can understand the structure of this document well. If anything appears to be missing, please contact me.

Recordings

You can find the recordings in the "Recordings" folder.

Field Recording

The field recording was taken on my phone, in Greven outside in the woods near a lake. I've recorded it with the built-in recording software by iPhone. It has been recorded in .m4a but converted to .wav.

Audio File - Recordings/Greven_Field_Recording.wav

Boiling Pot

I've also taken some recordings of a boiling pot filled with water. It makes a very interesting sound. These recordings were all made using Audacity and my Blue YETI Microphone. The .wav-files are all normalized at -1db and phase corrected so that they can be used as samples.

Audio File - Recordings/BOILING_POT/HIT_BOOM.wav

Audio File - Recordings/BOILING_POT/HIT_DULL.wav

Audio File - Recordings/BOILING_POT/HIT_FX.wav

Audio File - Recordings/BOILING_POT/HIT_GRAINY.wav

Audio File - Recordings/BOILING_POT/HIT_HIGH.wav

Audio File - Recordings/BOILING_POT/HIT_ROUGH.wav

Audio File - Recordings/BOILING_POT/HIT_THUD.wav

Audio File - Recordings/BOILING_POT/HIT_WOBBLY.wav

Creating a Resonator

You can find the resonator projects in the "Resonator" folder.

Earsketch

Creating a resonator turned out to be impossible within the limitations of earsketch and jython music. First I tried creating one in Jython like this. It didn't really work out that well. It can give some nice textures, but in general does not really work the way a resonator is supposed to. It also has to generate a whole bunch of tracks just to achieve it's sound because every effect can only be applied once to each track and there is no way to change the order in which these effects are applied as well. Sadly EarSketch only has a (very sketchy) 3Band and a low-pass filter and no high-pass filter...

Audio File - Resonator/Earsketch/utilities.mp3

The file contains other utilities I have used to handle these tasks, hence the name utility.

I then tried to get an idea of how to code a plugin using JUCE which is a vst C++ framework. But that turned out to be way out of proportion.

Python

Every $f_n$ that is $n$ half steps away from $f_0$ can be calculated like this: $$f_n = f_0 \times 2^\frac{n}{12}$$ This is important because this formula will appear whereever I calculate notes frequencies. Usually relative to $A4$ which is exactly $440hz$. So I implemented the resonator using different python libraries like this. There are a bunch of parameters you can change:

inputFile = 'input.wav'
outputFile = 'output.wav'

keyNote = "C3"
mode = "MAJOR7"

Q = 25
filterCutoff = 2000
wetDryMix = 0.7

Using these settings with $F3$ and $C3$ I created these two sounds:

Audio File - Resonator/PyResonator/output_F3_MAJOR7.wav

Audio File - Resonator/PyResonator/output_C3_MAJOR7.wav

If you'd like to try out yourself you can also use this GUI version of the resonator. It turned out really capable!

Using MIDI

You can find the MIDI files in the "MIDI" folder.

Getting started

First I recorded these .mid files in Ableton using my M-Audio Oxygenv8.

• Kick
• Drum A
• Drum B
• Acid Synth

Creating audio

I then used Ableton's Sampler as well as Virtual instruments to create these audio files. For the kick and drumkit I used Ableton stock samples of the TR-909.

For the kick I used some saturation and a drum bus like this.

Audio File - MIDI/Audio/Kick%20Loop.wav

For the drum loop I didn't use sound processing because I want to add the effects in EarSketch or when Mixing the entire project.

Audio File - MIDI/Audio/Drum%20Loop%20A.wav

Audio File - MIDI/Audio/Drum%20Loop%20B.wav

For the Acid Synth I used an Analog Synthesis preset from Ableton. I used a Resonator and some Reverb to give it a wider sound. The Auto filter modulates the sound and gives it more dynamic.

Audio File - MIDI/Audio/Acid%20Synth%20Loop.wav

Winona - The Result

You can find the files in the "Winona" folder.

Earsketch

I tried putting everything I had made so far in this homage of the track "Winona" by DJ Boring. The Earsketch Project is here. I also could make use of many of the utilites I have made before. When rendered the project sounds like this.

Audio File - Winona/Winona.wav

Ableton

For the last touch and finish I used Ableton, since fixing small things in the mix takes way to much work in EarSketch and there are not really any tools like 8band-EQs or Side-Chain compression, that I like to use. I exported all Tracks separately from EarSketch. Then I created an Ableton Project and started mixing. I just fixed panning and audio levels and added some compression. Most importantly I balanced out the rides

By that I can proudly present the final audio file. Rendered as .mp3 as well as .wav

Audio File - Winona/Winona_Final.mp3

It is amazing that we live in a time where computers can produce almost any sound imaginable. I had a lot of fun during this project. I hope that some of my solutions aren't to "unorthodox" for this project. If you have any question, please contact me any time.