Record some "everyday" sounds, process/transform/arrange them, creating a composition that, in Paul Lansky's words, "views the mundane, everyday noise of daily life through a personal musical filter."
Brainstorm
Inspiration
A large part of my everyday life during this quarter was devoted to Japanese, because class was 5 days a week at 9:30AM. Waking up so that I had a significant amount of time to prepare for class was difficult, especially since it took over 20 minutes to walk to that class. Because of this, I was typically in a rush in the mornings. My Homebrew - titled ~ mOrnINg RUsh ~ - is inspired by my scramble to get ready for class.
Vision
There were a couple specific sounds that I wanted to bring out in the piece. The first obvious sound was the alarm sound. I chose to defamiliarize the alarm clock and add in multiple of them to represent the urgency/time crunch I'm in during the morning. I felt that the alarm sound would act as a good background beat, yet still make the piece feel relatively cluttered (which I wanted).
At the beginning, I wanted the yawns to make the entire piece feel somewhat drowsy, representing the way I am when I wake up. The piece gradually gets more and more rushed as time runs out, before I realize I'm completely out of prep time. To signal this end of preparation, I used the 1 full alarm and the door slamming - a representation of me rushing out of my dorm. I then intended the piece to get even more rushed at the end, with the running getting continuously louder and faster, before ending suddenly with me arriving at the classroom and my teacher saying "good morning".
Milestone
Made with: ChucK
Take a look at the corresponding ChucK file here!!
Final
Made with: ChucK
Take a look at the corresponding ChucK file here!!
Other Thoughts
Difficulties Encountered
My main difficulty was deciding on how cluttered I wanted the piece to sound. Since I wanted to depict my morning rush, which is usually pretty cluttered (mentally and I'm usually scrambling around all over the place in order to not be late), I wanted the piece to sound somewhat cluttered. However, I wanted it to be 'musically cluttered', and not just messy. Deciding the balance between this was one of the difficulties I faced.
Another difficulty was that since I'm still not very familiar with ChucK, I'm still playing around a lot with sounds, and there are still many sounds that I feel like I get stuck on producing. While I'm more used to manipulating time now when compared to the difficulties I encountered during the first assignment, I feel like there is still a lot for me to learn in ChucK. Furthermore, during the first assignment, I had some issues changing the 'gain' (i.e. I was blowing my ears out). Because of this, I think I was a little afraid of changing the 'gain' too much, so that the dynamics weren't varying very much (which Ge noted when I played my milestone).
Also, since my audio recordings were relatively cluttered, it was a bit hard to tell what some of my sounds were meant to be (especially the running down the stairs).
