
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.
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.