Ari Singhai – CPSC 035 01 FA20

The Funky Finale: My Closing Statement in Waveform 11

Ari Singhai on December 13, 2020

Before breaking down my piece, here’s the MP3 and a couple screenshots of the final Waveform session in all its glory:

Introductory musings:

I quite enjoyed embarking in the direction of jazz/funk-infused electronic music last time around, and with this project I wanted to delve into that combination a little deeper. Crucially, for this project, I had access to my MIDI keyboard, which opened up a whole new realm of possibilities musically; in my opinion, as much as one can attempt to “humanize” melodies and harmonies drawn in MIDI form or played on a virtual keyboard, nothing quite sounds as organic as the dynamics and articulation one gets from playing on an actual keyboard. Musically, my chord progressions and melodies were thus all born out of endless noodling and improvisation on the keyboard – using this as a foundation, I moved into formulating ideas for my intro.

I boldly decided to open my piece with vocal harmonies that would introduce my key of F# minor (extended with a 7th and 9th) – I use the word ‘boldly’ here as I am decidedly not a singer by trade; this presented an interesting challenge with regard to maintaining consonance and, to put it bluntly, not starting the piece out on a really sonically poor note. Using the information I gathered about the iPhone mic at the very beginning of the course, I used a close-mic technique in recording to save myself some trouble with adjusting levels at the mixing stage, as well as to make it easier to gate any background noise. I recorded 5 degrees each of chords that I planned to use at some point in the piece, and cut the background noise out in each individual audio file with Audacity’s “noise reduction” feature, by taking a noise profile of the room I recorded in. Several takes later, this is the dry version of the opening harmony of the piece.

This wasn’t, however, to be a piece at all dominated by vocals – I wanted to harness my harmonies to create an ambient pad sound whilst still retaining the human quality of my voice: effectively a vocoder-esque sound. This is the effect-laden intro you hear – I apply a phaser over 16 beats to allow it to take on a sweeping quality, gradually lifting the low-pass filter off to add to this. Each degree of the harmony moves outright left to right or vice versa over the four bars to create a sense of movement, shown in the panning automation curves below. It is This is accompanied by a fairly heavy reverb and delay on it to create an ambient spatial quality and dovetail into the following pad-dominated part of the intro effectively.

Turning vocal harmonies into a synth-esque sound with a slew of effects

Introduction Pt. II:

An example of the sidechaining to the kick

And that’s exactly what occurs next: the stacked vocals transition into a pad playing the same notes as well as an ambient rhythmic sound effect of a crowd at a party (courtesy of Splice, original sample of 110BPM slowed down by ~9.091% to reach 100BPM), in the second part of our introduction. These two elements sit firmly atop an introduction of our 100BPM, 4/4 pulse played by bass drum with the high end cut out (to create an “underwater” feeling). This is then joined by a secondary layer of the same chords (played in a different inversion) played by a keyboard/pad sound that I created in Waveform’s native 4OSC instrument with sine and triangle waves with a long sustain and release, to fill up the textures a bit. The second 4-bar phrase also sees the introduction of a sub bass playing a variation of the chords’ root notes, and a noise sweep to build up to the first major melodic portion of the piece. The most significant thing about this section sonically is the use of sidechain compression – every element but the kick is sidechained to the kick. This gives us an element of that dance music novelty and vitally contributes to the pulse and bounce of this section, effectively foreshadowing what is to come later in the piece.

Section 2: Development of Funky Melodic Motifs, Grooves and a Bassline:

What follows is a release of tension, albeit not in the form of a “drop”; this, instead, is where I start to develop some of those jazzy motifs. The intensity, texture and bounce of the four-on-the-floor kick and stacked pads and bass cuts out for this section, switching to an airy, keyboard and pad-driven section where we get a clear sense of the F#m9-Em9 chord progression, complemented by a pitch-bent keyboard ostinato sitting on top of the pads. The chord-playing keys, whilst playing in unison are panned slightly left and right respectively to spread the mix out. I made the slightly cheesy choice here to include a sound effect of water being poured at the beginning of this eight-bar phrase – I am convinced there’s something metaphorical here about the piece “flowing”. The second half of the phrase sees the introduction of the bassline that underscores the groove that follows. We finally build up into the main melodic motif with this as well as another noise sweep (raw this time as opposed to sidechained).

The second eight-bar phrase of this section is where we get the first listen to the main melodic motif of the piece (a product of keyboard improvisation). This is played by a Subtractive synth that I created built off one of the keyboard presets, increasing its glide and decay and reducing some of the bulkier spatial effects from the original. With regard to general sound design for this project, I made a preliminary promise to myself – I wanted to design any and every MIDI sound I used myself to some extent (i.e without using, say, an untouched Subtractive preset in its original form).

The main melodic motif, played into the MIDI keyboard utilizing both pitch bend and subtle dynamic changes

All of the melodic aspects of these phrases noticeably sit atop a light drum groove – it is deliberately rather soft and insignificant without occupying too much of the low and high frequencies, more intended as a topper of sorts. I made this choice to maintain the emphasis on the development of the keyboard phrase and basslines, two important features across the entire piece. This was built using samples input into Waveform’s native drum sampler, with high velocity sensitivity to humanize the dynamics, particularly on the hi-hat. I wanted this section for the most part to feel organic, to strike a sharper contrast with the more conventional electronically influenced parts of the piece. The signature reverb-laden snap ends the section and signals a transition to the hook/drop buildup.

The drum groove in question with “humanized” hats

Hook/Drop Buildup:

The hook buildup in question is instrumentally a rather sharp contrast to the section that precedes it; it’s probably most reminiscent of the wet, pad-laden, percussive part of the intro, this time combining my vocal harmonies and the pad to really thicken the texture. The pad and bass from that section are reintroduced and the effects on the vocals are rather different, mainly in that they are slightly less heavy and slightly more conventional and human. Gone are the dense, robotizing dynamics filters, instead creating a more breathy and open vocal sound. This is coupled by a new variation on the vocal harmonies: a more percussive, plosive sound, foreshadowing the synth pattern in the hook. There is a greater amount of reverb and chorusing, as well as a light sidechain to the bass drum on each quarter note to maintain emphasis on the buildup. For the first time, I opted for the gimmicky EDM bass drum speed up (by subdivisions of 2) – it feels like a cop out and I’m disappointed in my lack of creativity here. So it goes. Finally, this time for real, the sidechained noise sweep builds into the hook section, as all instruments are cut out for the less-than-subtle transitioning “Woo!”.

The Hook:

the sharp articulation of the drop chords

Formulating the hook was an interesting process. So far, the pieces of the project I’d created were stylistically very different to one another – it was either building up to a texturally heavy, synth pad and lead-dominated drop, or a typical jazztronica-inspired funk break, posing quite the dilemma. Naturally, I opted for neither. In the spirit of creating contrast, I went directly against the wet, nebulous openness of the buildup and went for sharp, syncopated and stabby synth chords atop a simple quarter note drum groove with a thick snare. I wanted to create a shock factor by countering the texturally heavy elements earlier in the piece with a minimalistic and groovy drop. This is further set up by the bassline that provides an interesting rhythmic counterpoint to the lead chords, an homage to the infectious grooves of 60s-70s funk.

I found that solely dry elements in the hook created a pretty dry atmosphere, though (realized how blindingly obvious this was as I wrote it). I needed at least one element to be differentiated from the rest of the drier ones to avoid the drop feeling too spatially boxed in – this is when I started improvising on the keys that play the main melodic motif. Whilst I originally intended for the keys in question to play no part in the drop because of how spacey they are, I found that they doubled pretty effectively as a synth lead, and would provide a bit of familiarity for the listener, making the transition between the preceding sections and the hook a little less abrupt.

This ended up being a pathway to me drizzling various more little, airy elements over the drop. Snippets of pads from earlier in the piece, a heavily reverberated woodblock pattern and more noodling on the keys were examples of this. One slightly jarring element that I came around to quite like was to was the detuned vocals that I low-passed to create a glitchy, error message-like effect.

In the second eight-bar phrase, the drop starts to use elements already introduced to thicken considerably. Pads and the vocal harmonies are reintroduced to counter the dry elements further, the main melodic motif is played twice with a slight variation on the second iteration, and the crowd sample and a quiet hat pattern lie at the back of the mix. Compression came in particularly handy here, preventing any individual elements in what is a rather busy hook dominating the mix.

More elements starting to stack up in the latter half of the hook

EQing on the stabby synths to leave space for the bass noodling

Bridge: Slow-down, change in groove, instrumentation and chord progression:

Here’s where things start to get *real* wacky. Segueing out of the hook, the vocal harmonies are sustained and we start to experience a major slow down in tempo (specifically, 100 to 65 in the matter of two bars). What I’ve attempted to create here is about four bars of rhythmic ambiguity and a sense of a ‘new beginning’ of sorts as we open up a new chord progression of F#m9-Em9-Bm-F#maj7. All percussive elements are stripped away for these eight bars as we go through the metric modulation.

The new four-chord progression sung by stacked vocal harmonies

A sweep then introduces us into a completely disparate style – eight bars of the new progression are played by synth pads and keys, and sung by the vocal harmonies. Underneath these however, is a smoother sub-bass line and a trap-influenced, punchy drum groove with snaps on the 2 and 4. This is stylistically very different from the funky elements sprinkled throughout the piece, standing out as a complete break from the rest of the piece whilst still retaining core elements. Significantly, the synth/piano lead that plays the main melody plays an interpolation of that same melody, adapted to fit the new chord progression and continuing to develop that motif. It is almost a call-and-response of sorts with the drop; two very different representations of what is fundamentally the same idea.

The new sub-bass line for the slowed-down section

We then proceed into a similar segue out, speeding back up to 100 over the course of what doubles as a buildup into the final hook. The bass drum speedup comes in handy here, as it clearly demonstrates the metric modulation back to 100BPM, smoothing the transition to our second and final hook.

Moving out of the bridge section with a metric modulation

Final Hook and Outro:

The second hook in many ways echoes the first, following the same structure with the same instrumental ad-libs albeit with a handful of subtle differences: firstly, there is a delayed entry of all of our low-frequency sounds, giving the impression of an extra bar that isn’t there. Secondly, sitting on top of the percussive effects is a repeating hi-hat phrase on a natural hi-hat sound, played on a MIDI keyboard and exported as an audio sample from Logic Pro – I avoided making the same mistake in experimentation that I did with my last Waveform project, in which I struggled greatly to make an organic sounding hi-hat phrase, as velocity manipulation didn’t seem to be enough to get my hats sounding human. Thirdly, the percussive, plosive vocal harmonies are reintroduced – I unfortunately had to merge the files as manipulating each individual wav file was both painstaking for myself, and my CPU. Finally, we have the noticeably high frequency of the sustained, repeated phrase on a new monophonic synth, high in glide, reverb and most importantly tremolo. These effects stop the repeating phrase from being too uniform, simultaneously giving us a sense of movement.

The effects on the additional lead in the final hook

Closing out the piece is a stacking of 10 layers of vocals in an ethereal tierce de picardie cadence (ending on F# major), the delay and reverb tails of which ring out to sustain that airy atmosphere built up towards the end of the hook, and indeed, throughout the piece at large.

The grand finish – effectively five separate layers of double tracked vocal and a final metric slow-down

Here’s the mp3 again, as scrolling can be a hassle:

MIDI Mixology: Latest Experiments with Waveform 11

Ari Singhai on October 19, 2020October 19, 2020

The track:

Opening thoughts

With this piece, I wanted to integrate funk/jazz influences into a four-on-the-floor pulse to create a cohesive piece with subtle rhythmic and melodic complexity that sits on a steady foundation. I decided that I would begin with a rhythmic motif by recording a hat pattern and refining individual note velocities to “humanize” them and simulate the effect of accented notes and “ghost strokes” in rolls. This is where my first roadblock arose – I figured that manipulating velocities alone would not be enough to create an authentic sounding hi-hat groove; I sifted through various hi-hat one-shots and individual samples and found that no matter what, the loop I created was sounding too robotic. This is when I decided to export the midi file of that hi-hat pattern to Logic’s default “East Bay” drum kit VST, where it seemed to sound considerably more human (perhaps due to better velocity sensitivity and a larger library of individual hi-hat samples) – I then exported this as an audio file, creating the first dominant element of my piece.

I use low-pass automation to gradually introduce this syncopated pattern, atop an admittedly cheesy “Uno, Dos, Tres!” audio sample that I distorted, pitch-shifted and time-warped to fit the 115bpm mould, and not provoke too intense a cringe in the listener. A fairly high-frequency (All effects are EQ’d as such) sweep sits underneath this, before I introduce the chord progression.

The chord progression and general melodic aspects that we hear in the introduction were born out of a lot of aimless improvisation. I settled on this particular chord progression as it lent itself well to sitting on a consistent 4/4 pulse without being “boring” (i.e a basic half note harmonic rhythm). My use of 7ths and 9ths give it a jazzy feel without being too tonally ambiguous, and I build the entire piece off this progression. This is played by an electric piano/pad sound that I built out of sine waves (I found that the triangle wave used in Waveform’s default electric piano sound was too aggressive and tended to slice through the mix as opposed to sitting underneath other elements – I added filters to it through the 4OSC instrument in addition to the EQ settings I added in the mixing phase).

Choosing effects to put on the electric piano playing my chord progression was an interesting process – since these are extended chords, effects like reverb and delay tended to make them sound murky and indiscernible, which is definitely not what I wanted. Changing individual note velocities didn’t seem to aid this. Instead, I opted to add a phaser and subtle tremolo to add some movement to the progression, without detracting from the harmonies themselves. To “humanize” the progression, I offset individual notes in each chord ever so slightly to give the impression of a rolled or subtly arpeggiated chord. The forest fx adds an ambience to substitute for the “room” that a reverb-laden sound would sit in.

The rationale behind the pre-chorus

We then move into a more conventional four-on-the-floor element: a snap on the 2 and 4 of each bar. While I did promise myself that I’d be a tad more sparing with my use of reverb on this project, I felt like this was a sound that needed more airiness, and so I decided to bite the bullet and add reverb to it. This, coupled with the introduction of a bassline, starts to hurry the piece along. The bassline in this section is less percussive; I wanted to use a smoother/legato bass sound – similar to a moog synth – here and settled on Subtractive’s sub lead, which I felt was one of the few options that was not super aggressive, or comprised of unnecessary and distracting high-frequency sounds, making the job of EQing that little bit more hassle-free.

To fill up our middle frequencies a little more, I layered the electric piano playing the chords with a second pad sound playing the same progression, with the use of a slightly more high-speed phaser to add some movement to the chord progression.

Instead of moving straight into a hook or drop as EDM convention would dictate, I took a bit of creative liberty and decided to have a bit of fun with my MIDI keyboard, improvising a little funk lead solo. There were not a lot of Subtractive sounds that lent themselves well to this, though – they were either too dry and lacking the articulation that I wanted, or too reverb-heavy, making it difficult to create a clear melody. As such, I decided to record this part on one instrument and duplicate it once it was what I wanted melodically. I automated the pitch wheel to give the impression of a reed instrument through pitch bending and legato articulation. However, to avoid a gimmicky synth saxophone sound, I layered this line with an electric piano to give it a different timbre. Both of these use a high pass filter to avoid clashing with the chords or bass, and are panned in opposite directions to each other to work more cohesively and fill up the space. They slowly shift in opposite directions as well, creating a sense of movement.

The last element I wanted to add to effectively ‘throw off’ the listener before the hook was a half-time drum groove, which is subtly introduced under the lead improvisation right before the hook.

The Hook

The drop sees a few fundamental changes. We revert to a typical four-on-the-floor groove, stripping away all elements except for the snap. On the percussion side, it’s a simple bass drum on each of the four beats and snare on the 2 and 4. The melodic layers are an interpolation of the chord progression from the first part of the piece, articulated differently. The lead is composed of two layered synths; both are saw waves playing the main chord progression, and they sit atop a bassline playing the root of each chord. It is effectively in ABAB form, with different little melodic or rhythmic flourishes occurring in between chords.

With the bassline, I used pitch automation to give the effect of each root note fading out as it is played. I thought about converting each individual bass note into an audio file and employing a slowdown effect, however found that that limited my options when it came to passing notes in between chords, causing an already fairly bare drop to border on too raw.

Use of pitch bend to get the best out of the bassline

The improvisation in between the 4/4 pulse is meant to be fairly random-sounding. First, I use one of my funk leads from the pre-chorus improvisation in an offbeat melodic fill-in. Next, I manipulated a cowbell sound to serve as a percussive fill-in. Using pitch-shift and reverb, the cowbell sound takes on a new quality, making an interesting segue between chords with a descending triplet fill. I wanted to fill the negative space in the drop with a variety of sounds, and used synth, bass and percussive fills to achieve this.

The second part of the hook sees the reintroduction of the hi-hat pattern from earlier in the piece. A couple of new elements are introduced as well; firstly a high, sustained note played by a synth (on which I applied a heavy amount of tremolo to give it a quivering quality). After this, a repeated arpeggio played by small square wave plucks, with a decent amount of reverb, is introduced. This brings us out of the first hook, subtly moving the piece along.

The bridge onward

It’s difficult to identify this section under the conventional structure of a song. At first, we return to the original electric piano and pad chord progression, sitting underneath the plucks from the hook. Reintroducing the hat pattern, we then move into a breakdown of sorts, where the half-time idea makes a return in full flow. I wanted to use elements of both the introduction and the hook to move away from our four-on-the-floor foundation for a brief phrase. How this sounded changed a lot throughout the process – I originally thought about stripping away everything except for the percussion and forest FX, but found that this was far too bare. I then accidentally copied and pasted one of the synth chord stabs from the hook and found that this actually sat on the half-time groove quite well – bringing in the pre-chorus bass and keeping the arpeggiated loop from the hook, this was interestingly cohesive. Towards the end of this section, I decided to bring back the improvised lead melody from the first pre-chorus and have this sit atop a second iteration of the hook.

This segues into somewhat of an apex, where we have a final four-bar iteration of the four-on-the-floor hook, with all major hook elements combined. I decided to make use of my original idea for the bridge, ending the final hook on a perfect cadence and closing out the piece with raw percussion.

General musings about frequency and dynamics filter choices

My EQ and dynamic choices were fairly intuitive, based on getting the most important frequencies and textures out of each individual sound. For instance, my bass drum originally had a pronounced mid-frequency resonance which I eliminated using a low-pass filter. Similarly, the hat pattern originally covered a number of mid and high-range frequencies, which would

have clashed with our snare had I not made use of a high-pass filter. The same thing applied to melodic components as well; preset synths have an ugly habit of covering more frequency ranges than they should, and as such, I had to cut higher frequencies on my bass sounds, and conversely reduce low frequencies on my higher-register leads. I certainly wanted to “fill the space”, particularly in and around the hook. However, given how texturally heavy some of my sounds are, it was about striking a delicate balance and not getting too ‘murky’ a sound.

Perhaps the most notable use of dynamic compression in my piece was the sidechain compression that I used in the hook and post-chorus sections. I sidechained all melodic components in the hook to the bass drum to allow it to cut through the mix and drive the rhythm of the piece. This also enabled the hook to be more reminiscent of a quintessential EDM “drop”, simultaneously ensuring our low frequencies were not too intense and did not clash. Further to this, the tremolo in the sustained synth and main chord progression served to humanize the sound, and create nuance in the melodic components’ dynamics.

Thrown for a Loop: My experiences with Waveform 11

Ari Singhai on October 2, 2020October 15, 2020

The track:

Introductory musings:

Recorded audio, quantized using time warp

I have always been an incessant table percussionist, much to the annoyance of family, friends and exam proctors alike – this is how I decided that my composition’s foundation would lie in a hand-drummed groove that I would record in a stairwell, using my phone’s mic in close proximity. In the intro, this sits on an ethereal four-measure pad sample (played around to attain this sound by adding reverb, more on this later), also to which I added a pitch shift to create a semblance of a chord progression. This is all complemented by an ambient vinyl scratch to contribute to the intro’s texture.

Granted, it’s a peculiar combination that I began with – it took a bit of experimentation to get there. I wanted to build into the piece; this meant beginning with a understated texture, effectively the bare bones of the project. Firstly, I wanted to introduce the chord progression. However, the sample is rather airy to begin with, so it was about striking a delicate balance between complementing the rest of the timbres as well as being full and ethereal enough to indicate the chord progression effectively enough.

Too much reverb/delay seemed to make it tonally ambiguous and messy; too little made the intro seem too empty. This is why I chose to add reverb with <20% wetness, but also make it sit atop an ambient vinyl sample to “fill up the space”. I simultaneously wanted to retain the airiness of the stairwell space in which I recorded my percussion groove, so simply applied distortion to the percussion line, as well as a reverb-laden snap on the 2 and 4 to marry the natural and electronic sounds. “Quantizing” my recorded sample was a tedious process. Using the timewarp function, I used each transient marker to align the audio with the 120BPM tempo; whilst my recording was generally accurate, I wanted the 3-stroke rolls to be as uniform as possible.

The intro with low pass filter automation

Moreover, in the spirit of “building into the piece”, I applied low-pass automation curves to both the pad and the drums, gradually increasing the frequency threshold to introduce both sounds. I originally thought to simply automate volume (i.e muted to begin with), but found that using the lowpass filter added the necessary complexity to the buildup that volume automation lacked.

Moving into bar 5, our next new element is introduced – Professor Petersen’s voice. I wanted to include a spoken word element to the piece; I tried, to no avail, to use the transient markers in the audio clip to time-warp and have Prof Petersen effectively “rapping”, but found that this added unnatural pauses and stretches in the sample, without retaining the quality of the voice itself. I, however, piggybacked off this result to completely “destroy” the voice altogether. After experimenting with filtering, compression, phasing and bandpassing, I settled on distorting, pitch shifting and reverbing the voice track, giving the impression of a phone line breaking up (the irony of distorting an excerpt from a lecture about audio is not lost on me). Voice was an interesting element to manipulate – splitting and repeating particular parts and pitch shifting individual words allowed me to use it as an instrument, effectively. I also used volume automation to bring life to the more “glitchy” repetitions of particular syllables or tones.

Manipulating Prof. Petersen’s voice with distortion and pitch shift

As the voice sample progressed, I wanted to add to the texture to segue into the “hook”/drop more cleanly. This entailed changing the effects on both the percussion and pad (removing the filters from the percussion and adding further reverb to the pad), as well as adding a bassline (I cheated and used MIDI, as I had created a chord progression – a stock sample to underscore the pad that I had already ‘messed with’ would have been very difficult to find). I experimented with different waves, and found that both square and triangular waves were a bit too sharp and aggressive – I didn’t want the bassline to serve a function beyond filling up the lower frequencies and sitting underneath the melody and chord progression, and thus settled on a sine wave. To avoid the bass clashing with the percussion and the drums/lower frequency sounds I would later introduce, I added a low pass filter.

As far as the rhythm of the bassline goes, I experimented with more stabby, uniform rhythms and found that they did not integrate well with what was already a busy combination of sounds. This is how I settled on more of a drone on the root notes of both chords (Dm7, Cm7).

The Hook/Chorus

Moving out of the voice sample, we see more of a conventional “build-up” into the chorus/hook of the piece. I was pretty decided on adding a sweep over 4 measures, and added a bitcrusher to it to sit better on the percussion. This complemented the saxophone sample I added (a snippet from a longer sample from Splice.com) and pitch shifted to suit the original key and chord progression of the piece, which was also bitcrushed. I wanted it to identify the pre-chorus and occupy a lot of space: adding reverb and delay with a large room size made this happen. However given the reed timbre, it was very easy to reach a plugin overkill with the saxophone; having originally phased and compressed the sax as well, I had to strip it down to just reverb and distortion.

With the “beat” temporarily cutting out, I felt that bar 17 was a good time to move into something of a hook. The word that came to mind for me was “big”. I wanted the texture to feel fuller, I wanted the section as a whole to feel less ethereal and more punchy, and occupy more space.

First up, achieving punchy drums: I sifted through the bass drum samples in the SSLIB library, and in the process realize that I didn’t want a tuned 808 bass drum as I’d already effectively created a sub bass. However, each of the more abbreviated, compact sounding kicks didn’t seem to “hit”, or fill up the low frequencies like I wanted them too. This is where I decided to layer a low pass filtered 808 kick with a high pass filtered, reverbed natural kick, giving the impression of an organic kick sound whilst filling up the space. This was definitely an arduous process, as multi-tracking a kick can create serious clashes. They initially did not sit atop the sub bass cleanly at all, and I had to fiddle with volume settings to have them sit underneath the mix effectively.

I kept the 808 theme by taking a snare and hat one-shot from the Apple sample library and creating a standard 4/4 drum pattern with little flourishes on the hats. I wanted to make the snare heavy, dominating the 2 and 4 of each measure. Adding reverb and layering it atop the reverb-heavy snap allowed this to happen. However, when looping that drum pattern, I found that the hats were dominating the high frequencies a bit too much; I foresaw that this would likely clash with the lead, so added a bandpass filter to keep the hi-hats in the pocket I wanted it to remain in.

Similarly I wanted the synths on the hook to be considerably larger. To retain the same chord progression, I decided to reverse the original pad sample – this was a lucky break, as the pulse of the original sample seemed to come out a lot more; this created a clear 4/4 sense to the synth pad, essentially allowing it to double as a surrogate lead. I removed the filters from the original sample and added reverb, making it easier for the chords to fill out our mid-frequencies.

Arguably my favorite part of the hook (and certainly the most tedious), is the pitch-shifted church organ sample, to which I added delay, a phaser and a multiband compressor. This altered the sound enough to make it a synth lead, not really discernible from its original organ form. I was looking for something that would add melodic complexity to the project, and it was a much better alternative to the repetitive, percussive synth leads that I was finding in other sample libraries.

Post-chorus

This dovetails back out into something of a bridge with the distorted sweep. I wanted a sense of structure similar to conventional electronic music – this meant interpolating the intro/buildup as a post-chorus or bridge. Here we see the return of my recorded sample in its bitcrushed and low-passed form. This is, of course, only an eight-bar section. The sweep in the latter half brings us towards the second chorus. From here on out, my thinking is fairly self-explanatory.

Second hook

The second iteration of my hook is largely derivative of the first. It’s largely an interpolation or a direct copy-paste of the majority of the elements used in the first hook. The notable differences, however, lie in the little rhythmic irregularities at the beginning of both 4-bar phrases. I patterned the bass drums as a little syncopation, to break away from the relative monotony of hearing the same thing twice. I wanted to play around with changing the melody, but found this counterintuitive as the lead melody had already sort of established itself as a motif in the first hook. Also worth mentioning is a one-shot blip that I pitch shifted according to the fifth of both root notes and repeated to serve as a percussive device and keep the beat moving. Lastly, I retained the reversed pad sample and organ leads, moving into the outro with the textbook sweep.

Outro

I wanted to do something slightly different with the outro, as opposed to a standard repetition of the intro. As such, after playing around with various automations and new plug-ins, I opted to pitch shift most bare elements of the intro down an octave, simultaneously ramping up the low pass filtering to allow the track to essentially fizzle out, using the automation curves on both the percussion samples and synth pad. This occurs gradually over eight bars atop the vinyl crackle. For me, this was the bookend that I wanted to end the track with.

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The iPhone 11, Mic’d Up

Ari Singhai on September 16, 2020September 16, 2020

Unpacking the iPhone 11 and the rationale behind 48kHz

Per Apple’s design specs and initial observations, the standard iPhone 11 has three microphones (all stereo).

Apple fails to officially report the product’s microphone’s maximum sample rates and bit depths, leading to conflicting information across discussion boards and third-party websites – however, per the most common figure and having figured out in practice, it appears that the iPhone 11 microphones are equipped with both mono and stereo input capabilities, at a maximum sampling rate of 48000Hz and bit depth of 32, progressing from the former 44.1kHz industry standard generally employed to export audio to CDs. It was simultaneously quite interesting to find that 48kHz sampling rates are becoming increasingly desirable for their compatibility with video standards.

iOS gives you the ability to switch between Stereo and Mono recording

Regaining control: Finding the right app

Finding an recording app that ensures uncompressed audio and the absence of built-in gain control was an intriguing process. 48kHz audio sampling is becoming increasingly common, allowing most standard recording apps to tick this box; although, interestingly, Apple’s own GarageBand records at 44.1 kHz.

I had a crack at a few audio recording apps: Dolby On enabled lossless exports and 48kHz/16-bit recording but seemed to suggest it had AGC in place (see below), neither Røde Reporter nor Rec seemed to suggest they could disable standard iOS gain control and Hooke Audio did not seem to support anything other than AAC/MP3 exports. As such, I opted for software developer Dayana Networks’ Voice Recorder Pro as my recording software, as this app was capable of executing each of the recording specifications of this experiment.

Putting it all into practice

I used Audacity to generate the sweep at a constant amplitude of 0.5. Using my laptop’s dual speakers, I placed my phone next to the left speaker, right speaker, at the center of the laptop, and 6ft away from the laptop (social distancing and its impact on spectral flatness?), and recorded each individual sweep using Voice Recorder Pro. After noticing negligible differences in spectral flatness between the location of the phone in regard to particular laptop speaker (i.e R/L, center), I repeated the short distance experiment outside of the suite, to observe the impact of background noise on the iPhone’s recording ability.

The recording software interface and its specifications

Here were the results:

It can be seen that the iPhone 11’s mic is able to pick up the majority of frequencies at a reasonable level; the perceived lack of flatness in parts of the FFT analysis can partially be attributed to background noise, and we can generally conclude that the spectral flatness and FFT results of the phone recording is dependent on a) the loudness/distortion of the output, b) the distance from the output (shown by our “socially distanced” recording 6ft away from the laptop and c) the room size (taking a recording in the courtyard demonstrated a noticeably quieter, “messier” and less flat recording, despite distance being similar to that of the recordings taken adjacent to speakers). Qualitatively, the lack of an oscillation in peaks demonstrates a solid spectral flatness to the iPhone 11, making its three stereo microphones of a clearly high quality and justifying android slander universally.

Sites consulted:

https://www.provideocoalition.com/48-khz-how-to-set-it-in-android-ios-macos-and-windows/#:~:text=Setting%2048%20kHz%20audio%20sampling%20in%20iOS,Airlinc%20(reviewed%20here)

https://www.provideocoalition.com/all-audio-production-distribution-should-go-48-khz-learn-why/

https://www.gizmochina.com/product/apple-iphone-11/

https://forum.juce.com/t/disable-agc-and-highpass-filter-on-ios/12812

https://www.apple.com/iphone-11/specs/

https://www.howtoisolve.com/where-is-microphone-in-iphone-11-pro-iphone-11-pro-max-and-iphone-11-exact-locations/

Splicing Tradition and Innovation: A Case For the Inclusion of Japan in the History of Computer Music

Ari Singhai on September 11, 2020September 11, 2020

Japan in recent history, beyond being typecast for acclaimed culinary exports and kawaii culture proliferation, has generally found itself widely associated with sprawling conurbations and images of ultra-efficient metropolises, fast becoming the archetype of a country at the forefront of technological innovation. Be it the standardization of the ingenious “washlet” commode (Image Source) or the advent of the Walkman, the country of 127 million has lived up to its billing.

Indeed, the Japanese Computer Music landscape is no different; Japanese creatives have played a crucial role in the history of computer music, making great strides within the electroacoustic genre and drawing on distinctly Japanese classical influences to create a period of growth analogous to the efforts of those at Bell Labs or IRCAM around the same time.

We start in the 1950s, when European influences started to pervade Japanese music, most notably through the arrival of musique concrète, a compositional technique pioneered by Pierre Schaefer in World War II which employs tape manipulation, utilizing discrete, “concrete” segments of audio spliced together to create ambient textures.

In 1953, 24-year-old Toshio Mayuzumi (Image Source) arrived with “Les Oeuvres pour musique concrete x,y,z”, a stirring piece that combines wartime influences with more traditional-sounding instrumentation in a 3-part composition. I believe that this paved the way for Japanese electronic music at large by immediately entering the cultural mainstream via public broadcasting and radio coverage. The NHK studio, where he composed his early musique concrète compositions, became a home to avant-garde Japanese collectives like the Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop) who wholly avoided traditional Japanese techniques in their compositions, rubbing shoulders with creatives like John Cage across the Pacific. Though the initial approach was to reject tradition, I find computer music in the region, and by extension, the history of computer music in general, is incomplete without the integration of Japan’s rich cultural heritage, which started to happen later in the decade.

While Japanese creatives were not directly responsible for developments like the advent of tape recording, multi-tracking and transistor radios as seen in the presentation, such Western developments catalyzed further growth in the Japanese electronic music scene and formed the foundation of classical fusions coming out of NHK studios. Composers and instrument-makers started to shift towards integrating Japanese musical heritage into computer music – cases in point include the building of a koto with an electronic amplifier, and an electronic shamisen. It is worth mentioning that neither of these stringed instruments follow 12-tone equal temperament, making their advent particularly significant given that we tend to consider computer music primarily within a Western context. This introduced a new angle to how we approach tonality in computer music.

Traditional Japanese-influenced computer music reached something of an apex at the Tokyo Olympic Games in 1964, when Mayuzumi’s Campanology, an overture that employed the use of recorded bonsho bell sounds, was played at the opening ceremony. The piece married products of European influences and musique concrète with traditionalism, a big statement for experimental music in East Asia.

Equally significant to Japanese composition, however, is what was going on the ‘computer’ side of things. Toshiba engineers in the early 1960s sought to experiment with the TOSBAC computer, birthing the TOSBAC suite (a less than subtle homage to the Illiac suite discussed in the presentation). Meanwhile, growing institutional focus on the experimental use of computers in music composition brought more R&D to light. By the time the 80s rolled around, Yamaha and Roland were developing various new and improved synthesizers out of Japan; the significance of inventions like Yamaha’s DX7 began to transcend the bounds of computer music, pouring into popular music and starting to influence music production as whole.

From Jikken Kōbō to Mayuzumi to the digitization of traditional instruments, Japan has brought both technological innovation and cultural relevance into the computer music narrative, very much warranting a comfortable place in electroacoustic folklore. Computer music is experimental at its core; it’s about challenging boundaries and harnessing technology to create things that musical convention tells us we should not be able to create – the Japanese have exemplified this throughout the last 70 years, all with a healthy respect for tradition.

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Works Consulted:

Takehito Shimazu. (1994). The history of electronic and computer music in Japan: Significant composers and their works. Project MUSE. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/585311/pdf

Tate. (n.d.). Jikken Kobo (experimental workshop) – Art term. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/j/jikken-kobo-experimental-workshop

Corran. Le Japon et la musique concrète : les stratégies proposées par Mayuzumi Toshirō et Shibata Minao pour s’affranchir de la pensée de Pierre Schaeffer au début des années 1950. (n.d.). Archive ouverte HAL. https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01588787/document

Toshiro Mayuzumi. (n.d.). Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mayuzumi-Toshiro

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxQ7LSw7BWA&feature=youtu.be

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