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. Record a TV show, or perhaps a radio talk show. Make a patch that picks out ``sentences" of dialog (detect phrase beginnings and endings from overall signal amplitude) and rearranges them.

7. (OK, this isn't vocal synthesis, but it would be cool). Make a patch which, if you listen to it with eyes closed, makes you think a motorcycle is riding around at random in a large field. The sound should be spatialized (so that it moves around) and its timbre and pitch should change with the speed. Include an occasional gear change.

8. ... 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 (Wednesday, June 8, 11:30), and turn in a copy on CD. Make a "readme" somewhere in the patch explaining how to turn the patch on and use it.