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