Final piece for my computer music class
My inspiration for this piece was from “The Call of Cthulhu” by H.P Lovecraft and the feelings surrounding cosmic horror (one of my favourite genres of horror), and the fear of the unknown. I focused on analog synths, Max MSP, Data Sonification, and MIDI the most during this piece. The song starts off with me saying a quote from the book, “I have looked upon all the universe has to hold of horror, and even the skies of spring and flowers of summer must ever afterward be poison to me.” As this is being said, a faint buzzing sound swells into a cacophony of the same quote being repeated over and over again, but adding changes like eq, delay, and pitch shifting. This buzzing sound was originally the sound of me scratching my couch, and then pitch shifted about 50 semitones. Another brighter humming sound is heard right after, with a mix of the lower buzz, and they both transition into the first big wave of the piece. The humming sound was created with a recording of a phone ringing, but slowed down, and pitched up. The main sound of this piece was inspired by M83’s solitude, more specifically, the synth wobble in the background. I used alchemy to recreate that sound to the best of my ability. I first started out with a simple sine wave. There were 4 main oscillators to work with, 3 of which I modified. In oscillator A, I increased the unison to 7, detune to around 40%, and changed it to a saw waveform. In oscillator B, keeping the saw waveform, I lowered it by 12 semitones, turned the phase all the way up to random, detune to about 70%, and unison to 8. In oscillator C, I added a more random waveform to create more flavour in the sound. To give it the wobble sound, I added an LFO to the filter cutoff on a triangle waveform, and used a rate of 4. Beneath it, I layered the same sound but with a rate of 16, so that it wouldn’t feel as empty. This created a very slow rhythmic pulse. At about 1:04, I start singing. This was done a bit last minute, because I couldn’t figure out how to fill the empty space, so I just resorted to something I was more comfortable with, which is singing. I don’t really remember the process behind it because I just did it on the spot, but I added heavy reverb, eq, compressor, and delay to the vocals. I’m singing the words “I’m still searching for a god”, which I also just came up with while I was recording and thought it fit the theme of the song, so I left it in. There is also a faint kick in the background. This was done with a recording of me hitting a wall, pitching it down, and then looping it (also heavily eq’ed). At around 1:57, the main pulsing of the piece comes in. This was done by using the same synth, and then pulsing it at a rate of 1/2. I added the recording of me saying the quote in the background and then pitching it down by several semitones, and delaying it even further to create an atmospheric effect. At around 2:09, a short melodic passage is played. This was done with a mix of a few things; Max MSP, Data Sonification, MIDI, and Musique Concrete. First, I created a simple custom midi instrument in Max. I started out with the “midiin” object, which outputs raw midi data, and set the input to Logic Pro X. Then I patched a “midiparse” object into it, which interprets raw midi data and attached a “maknote” object, which generates a note on and off pair, and a “noteout” object, which transmits midi note messages. Separately, I added a toggle button to a random object with a parameter of 128 (because there are about 128 midi sounds built into max), and attached that to the “pgmout” object, which sends a program change message to a midi device. I can’t remember what the number of the midi sound was but it was similar to a piano sound. Then in logic, I created a new track and added an “External Instrument” effect, and set the destination to Logic Pro Virtual Out. I then added eq, compression, and very very faint distortion on it. The melodic passage itself came from a piece of sonified data. I love Fortnite (the game), so I found some statistics regarding it, and then aleatorically assigned notes in the E minor scale to it. For this process, I called my mom at random times, and asked her to say a letter between a-g, and then assigned that letter to the data (I did tweak it a tiny bit, because some of the melodies sounded a bit too off for my taste). Then I played the notes into logic using my midi keyboard (akai mpk mini). Two side notes; almost everything was played with that keyboard, and I chose the key of the song using the same aleatoric process. I added a static sound in the background, which came from recording my friend’s record player. At about 3:32, the sounds of violins come in, which I just used the Logic preset for. I added a bit of distortion on this too, to add a bit of “crunch” to the sound. Another melodic passage comes in, which was done by the same process, just different aspects of the data (eliminations, revives, time of day…). Before moving onto the next melodic passage, I wanted to create a build up into it. This was done by off putting the notes within the wobble synth, which then builds into a big wave, playing another melodic passage. At about 5:55, the main wobble synth is back in, the violins grow more and more distorted the higher they get, and I am singing again. The last few measures of the piece have just the wobble sound to end the piece “calmer”. I think this piece has an intro+ABCA’ form. The intro would be the quote, the A section is up until the first melodic passage is played. The B section is until the build up into the 3rd melodic passage, and the C section is until the singing starts again near the end (A’). I think the genre of this piece would be categorised as ambient synth (not too sure though). A lot of this process was done with my eyes closed, figuratively and literally. I had all the separate components and knew what synths and what sounds I was going to use, but I wasn’t too sure how I was going to put them together. Oddly enough, the best way to put things together and see if it sounded right, was to close my eyes and listen. This allowed me to actually listen to the music, and see if it gave me the feelings associated with the theme. The main quote of the piece suggests that someone has seen something so incomprehensible, that now mundane beauty, such as the flowers of spring, no longer feels beautiful. Keeping this in a minor key that occasionally had moments of “major-ness” was important to me, because I wanted to portray the little glimpses of hope or memories that someone experiences after facing such a horrific event (presumably a large sea creature according to Lovecraft). I wanted to try to create brief moments of uncertainty in this piece as a nod to one of the central themes in this piece, because to me, there is nothing scarier than the fear of the unknown.