Inspiration
There are many sources of inspiration but I will just name two. The first source of inspiration is my fondness for dance music although it isn't often apparent. With that in mind I thought it would be a good idea to create a psuedo techno composition using CSound. The second part of my inspiration might be familar to many of you who have visted homestarrunner which is the "Techno" Strong Bad Email in which he breaks down techno into simple repeating beats and random sci-fi noises.
Samples
As was alluded to in the inspiration I did use a few samples of random quotes, some sci-fi sounding, but all of which are interesting in some way or another. The files were found here. The files used were the following:
- behold.wav
- cage.wav
- robotmonster6.wav
Unique Instrument
This instrument sounds like an insect buzzing to me. It is a simple oscilator combined with a phasor and finally fed through a reverb. The reasoning for using the phasor was to calculate a scalar to use for the left and right channels. The reverb works on the oscilator signal with a length equal to the duration of the clip.
Composition
The entire composition was created by using csound opcodes and instruments. However there were some wav files processed but CSound was used for the majority of audio creation and sequencing.
The composition has a running element of a drum like beat with which everything else is layered upon. The choice to use a drum beat to start was easy to come to as you find drum beats used heavily in many areas of techno music.
One of the requirments of this composition was that it have grainular synthesis in it. To accomplish this I decided I would have a subtle noise throughtout the file. The effect was achived by running grainular opcodes on the "behold" wave file mentioned earlier. This created a very noisy sound which was very hard to recognize as the original sound. This was then played back at a low amplitude to cause it to blend into the background.
Another effect which was attempted was that of using an HRTF to create a 3D like transformation to the audio. This was used on the "cage" clip but I was unable to detect if the HRTF did anything. I have run into HRTFs in the past in the form of Aureal A3D so I do know the technique works. However for any number of reasons I was unable to ascertain if I had used it correctly in this composition.
A common element in this composition is the use of repeating triplets of octaves. These are used to build up on the basic drum and noise beat mentioned earlier.