COSC 4P98 - CSound Composition
Steven Wingfelder
CSound Composition - The Electronic Beatbox Paradox
The inspiration for this terrible mashup is the paradox of beatboxing over an electronic tune. Beatboxing is defined by ... "imitating the sounds of a drum machine using only one's voice." What if we broke that definition and added the polar opposite, music created solely by algorithms on computers.
Files
The Makeup
I start the composition with a simple open-source beatbox loop that I loaded into a sample table and played with a loscil3 at an amplitude of 30000. I play the first kick of the loop a couple times to get it started and then play the whole loop for 10 seconds straight. While this is going on, I begin to play an electronic strum that sounds like someone was slowly stepping on the wah-wah pedal.
We end the beatbox intro and move into some pure electronic music. I run the intrument I made using a buzz with a linen, expon and oscil as inputs. I will get into the makeup of this later. This sounds like a dial up modem on steriods.
I sampled the intro to a Kanye West song called On Sight, which in itself sounds like it was created using CSound. I start the Kanye song the same way I did the beatbox sound, just a couple kicks of the first note to get it going and then let it play for 10 seconds. All the while we have my insturment adding an extra buzz in the background.
In comes the granular synth engine that represent our transition back from electronic only to electronic beatbox. I play a long synth that sounds like you about to warp in time. Also you can hear the pacman sound being played at a slower tempo than normal in the background.
To end it off and truely capture the essense of our new genre electronic beatbox, we turn up our beatbox loop and add in some quick samples of granular beatbox to finish off our sound.
My Instrument
This is the instrument that I created.
It was a creation of choosing 4 different opcodes and randomly assigning values to them until I felt like i created something resembling a dial-up modem. Our expon takes three inputs that are paramaterized during the call. The same is true for our linen, these are the base opcodes used. I then use the output of linen (k1) as the amplitude input for the oscil. The other two inputs are also paramaterized. My buzz opcode continues with the madness and takes 0.5 for an amplitude, the frequency is calcualted by taking a var p5 and subtracting the output of the oscillator followed by a variable for the number of harmonics. Lastly, my output takes the output from the Buzz opcode and multiplies it by 1.5 times the linen output... JUST BECAUSE.
The result is a pretty weird, grainy sounding 56k modem... or just ear pain.
Sources