Music 172: final project
The final project is to be presented finals week (the scheduled final exam is
Tuesday, June 8, 3-6PM.) There are only two weeks to do it in, so it ned not be
a huge project. It should do something original or creative and run in a way
that you can demonstrate it in front of the class. It could be some sort of tool
(synthesizer or sequencer) that you can demonstrate; or a musical idea or sketch,
which needn't last more than a minute or so. Here are some ideas:
- Take a single vocal utterance (such as "take me to the zoo" or a political
slogan) and make a few 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.)
- Make a canon of two sounds (spoken phrases or some other sample with
some internal rhythmic markers) 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 difference so that we hear the changing phases.
- 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.
- 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.
- Make a looping sequencer with controlled randomness. There should be a
clearly audible loop, but each time through it should vary the particular notes
or sounds used.
- Use a pulse generator, a filter, and a reverberator
to make an imitation of
this famous bit of 1950s electronic music .
- Your idea here...