Create an interactive software system, and compose a short piece by incorporating the following two elements:
a generative drum machine with interactive control
generative soundscape (integrating algorithms to generate/modify the structures of sounds)
Vision and Inspiration
I got the chance to watch two of my close friends perform as part of Stanford Taiko earlier this quarter, and was awed by how powerful the performance was. My drum machine and soundscape are inspired by a Taiko piece performed by Stanford Taiko called Amaterasu.
Interactions
The interactions I decided to include are as follows:
The space bar can be pressed once for the beginning beat. 'a', 'b', and 'c' control 3 main drum beats, while 's' controls a shaker beat. The ending is executed by using '-' followed by '='. Keys 1-5 are various solos (sine waves and pulse waves), while I tried to include the energy involved in Taiko through the 'HA' sounds that can be started using keys '6' and '7'. While the 'up' and 'down' keys give more detailed gain increases/decreases, the most significant gain changes come through the mouse interaction. I used the mouse interaction to include part of Taiko performance into my piece - Taiko players often use a lot of arm motion for certain larger swings.
Milestone
Made with: ChucK, Mac Air keyboard, Mac Air trackpad
Take a look at the corresponding ChucK file here!!
Final
Made with: ChucK, Mac Air keyboard, Mac Air trackpad
Unfortunately, I do not have a recording of the live performance, but here is an pre-recorded audio recording.
Take a look at the corresponding ChucK file for the drum kit here, as well as the corresponding ChucK file for interaction and setup here!!
Other Thoughts
Difficulties Encountered
I had a lot of difficulty at first just getting the keyboard connected. Once that finally worked, I had issues during my milestone where certain parts of the performance were not synced up because I was basing the sync entirely on my own rhythm (i.e. when I pressed the key) rather than using events. Figuring out how to use different events took me a really long time, but helped the syncing of the different parts of the piece.
Still Working On
There are also still a few things I wanted to work on such as increasing and decreasing speed. Currently, my speed change is a little rocky since I did not include a transition between the 2 speeds. Furthermore, there are a lot more keyboard interactions and mouse actions that can be added. Perfecting the mouse control will take a lot of practice, but I'm hoping to get better at it with time!
Credit
Parts of the beats and yells were inspired by 'Amaterasu' performed by Stanford Taiko.
Parts of the event code is pulled from SMELT documentation and Ge Wang.
The tambourine and 'HA' wav files are from freesounds.org.
