In order to tie up what we've seen and done this quarter, and to get everyone doing something different from their midterms, the final assignment is to make a musical sketch organized around either vocal samples or vocal synthesis. This could take many forms, including:

1. Set a poem to music. I'd advise using a really short poem. Separate the words and do different things to and/or with them in a way that works with the sense of the poem.

2. Do a rap-style setting of two or three words or short phrases on top of a rhythm section (percussion, bass line, a chord or two)

3. Take a single utterance (such as "take me to the zoo" or a political slogan) and make four or five short experiments with it (processing it, re-arranging it, interrupting it with some busy synthetic sound, layering it progressively more thickly, playing it with a specific word turned around backward, playing it with gradually descending pitch, etc.)

4. Make a canon of two phrases looping together. Make one of them 3/2 as long as the other, (so that the loop has three of the first and two of the second) with a slight error so that we hear the changing phases. Put each voice through a pair of comb filters to make a four-part harmony.

5. Don't let us hear the phrase at all, but using a looped sampler, freeze timbres from it. Go through it first at a single pitch (that is to say, play notes that overlap but whose source goes progressively through the sample). Then do it again varying the pitches, perhaps randomly chosen from a blues scale.

6., ... Well all right, think of your own idea.

Projects will be graded on four criteria: musical quality; quality of the patch design; variety of techniques used; originality.

Please be ready to present your work at the final exam session, starting 3PM Tuesday June 12.

Try to FTP your files to the PC drop folder in advance of the final session. (FTP to man104-1, log in with your class account, cd to /u1/mu171w/public/drop-pc, and make a subdirectory there with your name as part of the directory name.)

As always, make a "readme" somewhere in the patch explaining how to turn the patch on and use it.