For my final project I cut up the song Suo Gan, which is a Welsh lullaby used in the Spielberg film Empire of the Sun (where Christian Bale sings it in a boys choir as a 10 year old - his 1st big movie, it's so legit - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNonF2n4qdE). One of the biggest problems I had was making the tempo consistent to use with certain underlying beats. The singer kind of drags and so it was hard to make it sound constant. I changed the tempo by first bringing the clip into recycle and labeling the bars so it gave me the original tempo. I then brought it into waveeditor and changed the tempo to various tempos that I used throughout the song. The first other clip I used was the intro of No Sex for Ben, by the Rapture.

I used a lot of different effects on Suo Gan in Metasynth. The program was one of my favorites because it was so simple and effective. But every time I did an effect and exported the file, the program would quit immediately. So, I had to do every single clip separately and it was a little frustrating. I think that, overall, Logic was the best program we used. It has such a simple layout and is a really powerful program for putting different elements together. My final project turned out a little psychotic - the different parts of it are only tied together by the Suo Gan sample and it is not in any one sample. But I had a good time doing it and just being able to use different sequences and effects.

I've listened to a few other final projects on people's blogs and I have been really impressed every time.

Variations on Suo Gan (Final Project)

http://www.zshare.net/audio/527386145d3b2499/

Could only make a direct link because boomp3 is down... will write about the song later.

Zach Klion's Trip-Hop Assignment

I think this project really exemplified the trip-hop style. The drums were pretty mellow and minimal, so when the vocal samples came in they were definitely the focus. I think the "we all go a little mad sometimes," was a good choice to portray the trippiness, terror and general dark vibe that is often found in trip-hop music. One sample (the woman's voice singing ooh, ahh) had static, or at least a very raw quality that really reminded me of the sound of Portishead. The samples were mixed well and the buildup and acceleration of the samples really created a feeling of craziness. Overall, I think this project was pretty sweet - it definitely followed the rules of the style (trip hop clearly) but with some creativity. Nice work Zach

Just wanted to post a link to a super cool dance/music video : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=flJ423MqfsQ. vixy is down so I can't just post it on the page. these guys are ridiculous dancers - although the song is kind of over the top.

also - I've been meaning to put up video of the mgmt concert I went to last week in NYC but I need to find my camera cord... sadly my friend and I couldn't get tickets to the Justice concert that was right after in the same venue. unfortunate..

For Project 4 I decided to do trip hop instead of jungle/drum & bass. I made samples from Portishead, Massive Attack and Morcheeba. Then I created my own drum line and and added a little melody line that comes in and out. I still have some more samples that I'm hoping to incorporate to make it more complex. Recycle was great for cutting up the samples but it was hard for me to incorporate everything together because of different keys. I'll see if I can do more on this one later...

Project 4

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Comments about Assignment 3

I started out wanting to do this project in the Ambient style. I began with some drony synth sounds but I didn't really want to deal with environmental sounds and some other aspects of the style, so I switched to Techno. First, I created a drum beat with a strong bass drum on every count. I used a few different techno drum patches from Dr. Rex but other than that the percussion part was relatively minimalist. I used one melodic progression, starting with a C-minor arpeggio, and recreated it with a few different synthesizers in different patterns. I used a lot of the reverb effect. I tried to avoid having any sort of climax in the melodic structure. I think the parts are a little too separate, and the melody is very distinct from the underlying drum pattern, so it is not actually classically in the techno style.

Assignment 3 - Techno

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Song below...

I just posted this Lemon Jelly song, Experiment Number 6, because the way they create a beat out of the static in the beginning reminds me a lot of the click assignment we just finished - creating music out of very little.

Lemon Jelly - Experiment Number 6

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Loop Three

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Loop Two

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Loop One

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Just some comments about the last assignment:

The first ringtone was made from a recording of my suitemate taking out our recycling. The glass bottles clanked together and made a sweet almost purely musical sound. In the course of my recording, I also chose some things that were just music to record: a roommate's singing echoing in the entryway, the bells of Harkness Tower and an organ performance at Woolsey. But ultimately, I wanted to make the ringtone from something not intrinsically musical. I basically just copied the first recording, moved the layers to different times and experimented with modifying speed.

The second ringtone was a recording of opening my entryway door with my ID; the beep and click of the heavy wooden door. I took a small splice of the recording to be repeated and experimented with the frequency changer in the Pluggo effects. I liked that the last repetition turned out to be an exact octave from the original recording.

runcnc

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runcnc

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the start

As my blog for Music 295a, I want to start this off just talking about some electronic music that I like, and my music interests in general. The name (Run CNC -- CNC being my initials) is a little throw to Run DMC, the sick 80's hip-hop group. Raising Hell, which they released in 1986, is a great album. Although their music is in no way purely electronic, they were a precursor to current rap which is pretty synthesized, etc.

Currently, I'd say my favorite music classified as electronic is Ratatat. It's hard to find a live video of them with any good quality but here is a live performance from Coachella 2007 of one my favorite songs, Seventeen Years:


I'm really into music videos -- especially those by Michel Gondry (he's done some great things for Daft Punk) or for Sigur Ros (which I plan to post later) -- and I recently found a stunningly beautiful one by LCD Soundsystem for the song Someone Great: