This week we read Chapter 4: Programmability and Sound Design from Ge’s book. I’ve broken down this response into a couple of parts I would specifically like to respond to.
Programmable Sonic Parameters
This part is one I imagine I’ll come back to often. Since I don’t have much musical background (only a deep appreciation!), it was really nice to see different features of sound laid out and described for me. I know that our next assignment involves creating ways for users to manipulate different sonic parameters, so it’s good to know what they are. On that note, I don’t think I’ve ever read a definition for timbre before… though I think I have heard it used in linguistics. Curious to see what components can be manipulated to modulate timbre. A friend and I were also discussing sonic “textures” recently in a conversation about artists like L’Rain or Moses Sumney (both artists that incorporate a lot of looping and layered vocals in their songs), using that term to to try to describe what it means to have a more maximalist musical style. I imagine sonic textures like perturbations on a many-layered plane.
Understanding the relationship between programming sound and programming time has given me a deeper insight into why ChucK is what it is. It’s been a cool paradigm shift to imagine sound as a kind of motion through time. I’d also like to highlight Ge’s point that “tools do more than serve a purpose — they shape our thinking. A useful tool suggests particular ways of working.” For me, learning how to program was a wonderful example of this. I began to see elegance in certain ways of doing where I hadn’t before.
Design with computers
In this section, Ge brings up the idea that we should “design things with a computer that it would not be possible without (Principle 4.5)”. We then discuss Paul Lanksky’s Homebrew and the idea that the invention of personal computers / recording devices enabled a new kind of sound to be captured and manipulated in a way that we hadn’t before — worldnoise! I very much loved the articulation of this idea, as I myself love to capture worldnoise (though I have never heard a word for it!). I love recording riverbeds, coffee shop chatter, the sound of my mom cooking in the kitchen, the sounds I hear from the inside of a car. Found sounds. I actually hadn’t considered the idea that these sounds were not able to be captured and saved until relatively recently before reading this. Reading about how this noise can be transformed into something pitched (using a comb filter) was also super interesting. I wonder if that’s how autotune works?