weimerhead

Yesterday’s Creative Computing was my first comprehensive examination of DigiDesign’s Protools. It’s designed for sequencing audio files, doing fade ins/outs and other editing. These files can be collaborated from all the other sound editing softwares I’ve been using. We discussed interface design and its direct relation to creative output. As such, the future of software design will certainly allow for increasing customisation of software interface, allowing the user to appropriate interface to his/her creative goals. To my amusement, the ProTools session we are using for playing around with is Nine Inch Nails, “Only”, from their latest With Teeth. Pictured here is their mainstay and musical genius, Trent Reznor (looking very emo):

With ProTools there’s a lot to get your head around, hell, it took me half an hour to figure out that I need to plug in my headphones into the M-box, not the G5, if I want to hear anything. Most of that time I spent reading the ProTool’s Reference Guide; my time wasn’t totally wasted. Other things I figured out in ProTool’s include using manual tempo, the function of the ‘slip’ and other modes (toggled with keys F1 - 4) and showing/hiding the various rulers above tracks. I’m sure I learnt plenty more too, but alas, it’s all a bit subliminal within the 21^st Century brain.

I’ve been toying around with Spear lately, seeing what happens when you do which; basically, I’m finding it often leaves you in an underwater sound world. Take the following two examples:

The truly digitalised glissando:

So basically I have used the lasso tool to slice the audio diagonally downward. The possible sonic results of such an edit on audio really excited me when I first delved into Spear. I mean, think about where each of these overtones begins playing, in time, and how rhythmically complicated that would look in notation. In the last small section, I used the ‘time region selection’ tool to select and transpose the last part down a considerable amount. Click on this image, to hear the way the sound ‘splashes’ down (gliss.) then is dunked underwater (transposed). Next:

Transposes up and up, then time stretches:

Slightly more complicated, using different techniques, alas, again this achieves watery sounds. The audio highlighted in red, is repeated (twice before and after the highlighted section) each time receiving a frequency transposition of around double what it was previous. The final section of audio is time stretched, with a little artfully chopped of the bottom. Click, listen to bubbles. Basically, it’s slightly disappointing that the sonic output stays in the watery ‘sound world’ even once you run entirely different processes on the audio.

Workshop presentation was again filled with delightful music, particularly impressive were pieces by Iannis Xanarkis and Phillip Glass. After reading and having heard much of Xanarkis, I was thrilled with his “Voyage absolu des Vnari vers Andromedc.” (1989) I’m so glad the speakers were pumped for this, at plenty of points the piece aroused the emotion of fear in me. I don’t know why. Apparently, he composed it entirely using graphs, well - nothing scares me more than mathematics. No, no, that can’t be it. Phillip Glass’s “Rubrick” (1982) was equally impressive, with mainly arpeggios, in a juxtaposition of sextuplets and quintuplets, all shaping for me the ‘rubrick’. Such rhythms look like:

Bibliography

Haines, Christian . "Creative Computing- DigiDesign's ProTools" Practical Class presented in the Audio Lab (Schulz 4.07), University of Adelaide, 27 April (2006).

Harris, David . "Music Technology Workshop - Xanarkis, Glass and Morris." Workshop presented in the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, 27 April (2006).