Category Archives: SuperCollider

Sounds created with SuperCollider program

Shorts: #21 Anarchy and Rapture

[play]Shorts: #21 Anarchy and Rapture (2007)

Commissioned and titled by Polly Moller in memory of Leigh Ann Hussey, who died tragically in a motorcycle accident on May 16, 2006.

I didn’t ever meet Leigh Ann, but I typed her name into google and found a memorial. It was clear right away that I would have liked her. Polly said, “she was like a pillar of fire,” the god of Moses. I’ve been reading a deconstruction of the Left Behind books from an evangelical who is as appalled by them as I am. The series is essentially about death, which comes for us all. A mystery we fear and around which we grope for meaning. In How We Die, Sherwin B. Nuland argues that death is what gives life meaning. We feel urgency to act and to create because we know it’s not forever.

But despite the meaning that death gives our lives, despite the necessity of entropy in the creation of life and it’s inherent implication of destruction, despite the beautiful simplicity, it still feels like a theft. I never knew Leigh Ann, but I’ve known many who have passed. Every time, I ask the same question. I know the answer, but I don’t feel it.

To create this piece, I recorded myself screaming and then convolved it with some impulses generated by SuperCollider. (The code is below.) I used Audacity to pitch shift some of the versions of this file and mixed them with sounds from my synthesizer.

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Shorts #10 Meditation Bustle

[play] Shorts #10 Meditation Bustle (2007)

Titled and commissioned by Jen Savage.

As I was making this, I recalled that I had a file on my computer which was Jen Savage talking. I’d asked years ago if I could make it into a piece, but hadn’t had a clear idea of what to do with it. Then I read something about subliminal messages, which inspired me to experiment with convolution. I convolved Jen’s voice with intermittent pulses and used the resulting timbre at the beginning and the end of the piece.

The other sounds come from my synthesizer. I made high pitch ticks by taking a couple really slow modulated pulsewaves and ran them through a high pass filter. The more ringing sounds have the same process again, but this time going through a low pass filter after the high pass, with the frequencies of both tuned very near to each other and the Q turned up so high it’s on the verge of a terrible high whine.

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Music for Panic Attacks

[play] Music for Panic Attacks (2006)

Over the summer, I was having problems with anxiety. I noticed that sometimes, if I exposed myself to stressful sounds, they would sometimes leave me feeling relaxed at the end, rather than more agitated. I set out to make something that would stress me into relaxation in this fashion. In stead I came up with this. During the summer, every time I heard it worked on it, it would reliably give me a panic attack. I played it on stage only once in August 2006 at the Luggage Store Gallery. It gave me a mild panic attack. I’ve decided not to play it again.

Other people note that it does not stress them out, so I seem to have found the magical combination to give myself (and nobody else) a panic attack.

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Èlègie

[play] Élégie (2006)

Cornetto and Computer / Cornet à bouquin et ordinateur

Cette pièce a un caractère mélancolique. Les notes sont instables, basculent de l’équilibre au deséquilibre, comme la vie vers la mort. C’est à la mémoire des proches qui m’ont quittés.

A piece with unstable notes. They glissando from equilibrium to precarity as life slides into death. This is a remembrance of my deceased mother and foremothers.

Recorded at CCMIX on 12 juin 2006. Played by Solène RIOT and I. / Joué par Solène RIOT et moi.

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Faux-bourdon Bleu

[play] Faux-bourdon Bleu
2006

An artifact-laden brassage where samples from french radio news are expanded and then compressed, creating a drone texture. The samples used include the France Bleu theme, the RFI news theme and some chanting from a protest.

De la synthèse granulaire avec beaucoup d’artéfacts. Il y a des enregistrements de France Bleu, RFI et une manifestation.

Performed at la Barbare, 11 Mars 2006

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Train Filter

[play] Train Filter (2005)

This piece uses GrainPIC to control filters over a sample of Broadway mid-morning traffic in NYC. Each filter is described by a cloud, which sets a resonant high pass filter and a resonant low pass filter, creating a resonant bandpass filter. The 1/q of each filter moves towards 1 as the cloud is played. The pitches of the filters move towards pitches in the Bohlen-Piece scale. The envelopes on each moment of filtering obscure the traffic sounds, so instead a train sound is evident.

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Rain Clouds

[play] Rain Clouds
2005

I’m writing a SuperCollider program based on Xenakis’ description of granular synthesis in Formalized Music. My program has a graphical interface very similar to UPIC. The working title for this program is GrainPIC. This piece is generated by a prototype of this program and is a proof-of-concept. Xenakis envisioned cloud synthesis with only sine wave grains, so the prototype only supports sine grains, however, I expect to change this shortly.

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