Showcase#
A gallery of standout student work from the course.
Assignment 4: Implementing FM synthesis#
Composer’s notes
I tried to recreate the song I was listening to while doing this assignment. I used a ratio of 4.0 and index of 1.0 because that sounded the cleanest after trying a few different ones out.
Assignment 3: Exploring timbre and scores#
Assignment 3 ran in two directions: a Creative cover of a TheoryTab song, arranged and synthesized in Pyquist, and a Technical project presented as a narrated demo video. The tag beside each name says which.
Composer’s notes
My composition is a cover/arrangement of “Pixel Galaxy” by Snail’s House (Keitaro Ujiie). I wanted to keep the song’s very high, syncopated lead and unusually rich harmony recognizable while rebuilding the production with my own synthesis. I used the supplied TheoryTab/Hookpad transcription for the Intro, Pre-Outro, and Outro 2 sections. Together, they total 160 beats at 149 BPM, or about 64.4 seconds before the synthesis and effect tails.
The arrangement has five independent layers: a bright lead, revoiced chords, an electronic bass groove, a high bell/arpeggio counter-line, and synthesized drums. The lead keeps the supplied note pitches and timing. For the chords, I kept TheoryTab’s exact construction, including secondary/applied harmony, alterations, borrowed scales, added notes, suspensions, and inversions. I moved the voicings into a lower register so they wouldn’t cover the melody, then used those chord tones to make separate bass and arpeggio rhythms.
Source: Snail’s House, Pixel Galaxy — TheoryTab transcription https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab/view/snails-house/pixel-galaxy No external audio samples are used; everything is synthesized in Python.
Composer’s notes
I cloned a dizi, a Chinese bamboo flute, with the goal of reproducing its tone and amplitude evolution in a playable instrument. The clone combines a pitched additive tone with a small amount of filtered noise to approximate the breath component, and it can synthesize notes at different MIDI pitches and durations.
The project has two main parts: a local browser tool for manual audio analysis, and a notebook for synthesis and playback. I used the tool to draw a piecewise-linear envelope, select ADSR regions, and measure partial frequencies and amplitudes, then exported these measurements into Python. The notebook sums 12 sinusoids, adds optional filtered breath noise, applies a duration-aware envelope to each note, and renders both individual notes and a melody using Pyquist.
Source recording: BOS_WWW_130_Flute_Dizi_Loop_Crown_E.wav from Black Octopus Sound —
Woodwinds of the World, licensed through Splice.
Composer’s notes
For this project, my intent was to create a dynamic, energetic pop-punk electronic cover of “Misery Business” by Paramore. I wanted to transform the driving rock energy of the original track into a synthesis-driven arrangement, balancing high-tempo lead melodies with a heavy, grounded rhythm section and punchy percussive synthesis.
To accomplish this, I extracted the melodic and harmonic structure from TheoryTab and implemented a custom symbolic arrangement pipeline using Pyquist. The lead synth utilizes dynamic amplitude modulation (a 6 Hz tremolo effect) to give the melody continuous motion without overpowering the mix. The harmony was pitch-shifted into a low octave to create a heavy sub-bass line, while the drum track was synthesized using frequency-swept sine waves for the kick and burst-filtered noise for the snare, spaced out in a quasi half-time pattern in light of the really fast 173 BPM tempo.
Source: melody and chord progression from Paramore, Misery Business, via TheoryTab.
Composer’s notes
Aerodynamic → One More Time → Aerodynamic. I was in the shower, and I had Voyager by Daft Punk on shuffle playing outside, kind of muffled, and in my head, I thought the two songs Aerodynamic and One More Time would merge well together. I wanted this piece to feel like a small live electronic set, with Aerodynamic as its foundation. It opens with a bell and swooshy wind sound, then the drums and funk groove enter suddenly. The electric guitar solo develops before the groove returns with it. One More Time vocals gradually introduce the second song, until the full chorus plays. At the end, the music blends back into Aerodynamic’s outro and ends in a full-circle moment with the wind and bells from the beginning. The structure of the way the songs overlap, the moments which they lead into each other, and the revised order of some sections is my contribution.
I built the arrangement from TheoryTab and synthesized most of the sounds in Python/Pyquist. The bells combine inharmonic sine-wave partials with individual decays; the guitar-like sounds use damped string modes, short excitation transients, distortion and filtering. Separate bass, percussion, brass, FM, counter-melody and pad parts provide contrasting textures. I asked AI to build a sample pad that I could use to add the vocals over it, then refined their timing by listening and giving annotations. The code stretches those clips to their musical slots, brings the brass in gradually, exchanges the bass parts, and moves the outro melodies through the stereo field.
Sources: both songs are from Daft Punk’s Discovery — Aerodynamic by Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, and One More Time by Thomas Bangalter, Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Anthony Moore. Melody and chord notation from Hooktheory’s community TheoryTab entries. Three short vocal crops from “One More Time” (Romanthony’s vocals) were sourced from Myinstants, uploaded there by Hydrargyrum; no Creative Commons or public-domain license is claimed for them. Everything else is synthesized.
Composer’s notes
Promise / Home — After Class is an arrangement of Drake featuring Majid Jordan’s Hold On, We’re Going Home, Bella Kay’s Promise?, and harmonic material from Zelgin Jackson’s I Told My Math Teacher…, with a short rap performance by my friend Vern. I wanted a warm R&B opening with a strong beat, a smooth DJ-style transition, and an energetic ending that makes the computer-generated instruments stand out.
The piece lasts 1:49.21. Drake and Bella share a 112 BPM setting, with Bella’s question leading into Drake’s reassuring refrain. At 1:19.29, the arrangement switches to a 140 BPM rap beat. Vern’s excerpt ends at 1:32.93, followed by an instrumental feature with fast hat rolls, bass slides, plucked-string responses, and drum fills. The backing is synthesized in Python; the sung and rapped excerpts are recorded performances.
The ending adapts Zelgin’s bass/harmonic centres into Emaj7 and C-sharp minor9. Its melodic hook, counter-melody, drum patterns, synthesis, and transition are newly programmed. No Zelgin recording is sampled in the final mix.
Songwriters and performers:
Hold On, We’re Going Home: Aubrey Drake Graham, Noah Shebib, Paul Jefferies, Jordan Ullman, and Majid Al Maskati.
Promise?: Bella Kay and Alexander Glantz.
I Told My Math Teacher…: Zelgin Uri Jackson.
Additional rap performance: Vern, from the recording I supplied; its embedded credit is “vern x H A L L O.”
Composer’s notes
This project clones the timbre of a baritone saxophone using additive synthesis. Starting from a single reference recording of one sustained note, I measured its fundamental frequency, the relative amplitude of its first 20 harmonics, and the shape of its amplitude envelope. The cloned instrument reconstructs that timbre from scratch as a sum of sinusoids (via a precomputed one-period wavetable) shaped by the measured envelope.
The pipeline is: download the source note from FreeSound and trim off the leading silence/breath
noise; analyze its magnitude spectrum and auto-detect each harmonic peak’s frequency and
amplitude; build a one-period wavetable from those 20 harmonic amplitudes and read it back at any
target pitch via a phase-accumulator; measure the envelope’s attack time and fit a decay/release
curve against the real waveform; and multiply the two together in the cloned instrument. The
wavetable/phase-accumulator synthesis technique and the two-stage envelope model are both adapted
from the course’s pcm-04-piano.ipynb example notebook.
Source recording: “Sax Baritone - C#3” by MTG — https://freesound.org/people/MTG/sounds/360251/ — License: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.
Assignment 1: Hello Pyquist and Synthesis#
Composer’s notes
I came across this Netherlands radio bulletin (Scheldt maritime radio bulletin from the Vlissingen Traffic Control Centre, the Netherlands 755 pm 260825 by klankbeeld – https://freesound.org/s/867767/ – License: Attribution 4.0), and thought it could be really cool if I turn some radio bulletin into a rap beat (I really liked the raspiness of the sound and how monotone the voice sounded). The collage creates a “rap track” consisting of 1. a monotone radio bulletin, 2. a rather energetic, aggressive rap beat track to highlight the monotone-ness of the radio, and 3. a background chatter of the children to emphasize the raspiness of the voice (since the radio bulletin I ultimately chose had a clearer voice than the Netherland audio I liked). Offsets and volume balance were carefully adjusted so that the three audios come together naturally as one song, instead of sounding like 3 audios obviously put together. I hope the discrepancy of mood and energy between the chatters of children, the heavy rap beat, and the mechanical radio bulletin announcement contribute to an ominous, dystopian ambience of the song.
License for used audio requiring attribution: 14066 school children ambience loop by Robinhood76 – https://freesound.org/s/867210/ – License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0
Composer’s notes
To be completely honest, this was my first time doing anything even remotely related to music composition/mixing, so I didn’t really know what I was doing. I didn’t go in with a plan and was just experimenting with everything. I wanted to try everything shown in the tutorial (ie. including volume, panning, fading in and out) and had a lot of fun with that, especially panning. I think as I was creating it though, I settled on a slightly spooky/enigmatic theme where I was envisioning a young girl/ghost in a white flowy dress standing alone at a graveyard overlooking everything on a windy night.
Attribution Texts:
grand piano C scale alt by djgriffin
License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0
Half-speed! Gypsy and Pluto wind chimes in a GALE by Philip_Goddard
License: Attribution NonCommercial 4.0
Past semesters#
Note
These showcases refer to a previous version of the course that involved a completely different set of assignments in the Nyquist programming language.