This week, we will demonstrate a number of important techniques and operations in Nyquist for sound synthesis (on day 1) and for generating scores (on day 2). There will also be listening sessions.

Slides

Jan 27

• Nyquist programming
  • What is a behavior?
  • Evaluation environment
  • Transformations
  • AT, STRETCH
  • SEQ, SIM
  • SEQREP, SIMREP
  • Creating and synthesizing a "score"
  • Type coercion
  • Sample rate conversion
  • Multichannel expansion
  • Scalar/signal polymorphism
• Listening session
  • Legend, Alistair Riddell 9:00

Jan 29

• Score-Gen and Patterns
  • Scores as Programs vs. Scores as Data
  • The score-gen Macro
  • Pattern Generating Objects
    • Periods
    • Simple pattern generators
    • Patterns of Patterns

Project 3 due Feb 4, 10pm

• Make a 30" composition, based on your interesting sound from the last homework assignment. You should make significant use of Nyquist to create and/or manipulate sounds in this piece. You may also use an audio editor and other software.
• Note: Some students interpreted Project 2 as a "micro composition", complete with intro, melody, and coda. Many of these focused on melody at the expense of the notes, which often were sinusoids or built-in piano and pluck sounds. You must develop better building blocks (notes, sound objects, ...) for this project. Those who interpreted the assignment as focused on rich sound objects can reuse and extend your Project 2 sounds for Project 3.
• Details: Think about the development of sound in time. What can you change about the sound that will be interesting? You can change pitch, loudness, duration of repeated sounds, tempo (rate at which sound events occur), density (do sounds occur often or not?), degree of polyphony or overlap (do sounds occur simultaneously or sequentially?), spectral properties (brightness, bassiness, etc.). Changes can occur at higher levels (a sequence of sounds can repeat with variations) or lower levels (within a single sound object, parameters can evolve). Your piece does not have to be exactly 30 seconds. The term "music" was intentionally omitted from this assignment (up until now). Try to forget everything you know about "music" and do not be bound by conventional ideas of what music is. Think about sounds for what they are rather than what they signify or the expectations they may or may not satisfy.
• Grading: In grading the homework, we will be looking for the development of sounds. In general, a composition that shows evidence of effort will do well. If you simply string together a bunch of sounds with slight modifications and without much thought for the overall composition, you will not do as well. You should think about changing the pitch, duration, timbre, etc. For ideas on how to vary your sounds, take a look at the code examples. In addition, your Nyquist code should be clean and easy to read. You should call PLAY only once. The sound events in your piece should be beautiful (or richly compellingly ugly if it suits your purpose), not a simple enveloped sinusoid or a built-in pluck or piano sound. See previous assignment and the note above.
• Submitting your homework: You need to submit three things to afs (instructions here).
  • A text description of your work: What were your intentions? What one or two main techniques did you use? This file should be, named project03.txt
  • Your SAL code, named project03.sal
  • Your resulting wav, aiff, or mp3 file, named e.g. project03.wav
  Be sure to keep a backup copy of your work.
• Note: You may also use code from the class examples and from other students, but you should always acknowledge your sources. Also, when you reuse code, you should make sure that you are not simply recreating someone else's work. For this assignment, you should not use materials from CDs or the web.