Creative Coding

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End of Term Performance

This is my final piece that I presented on January 19, which is based on Bring Me The Horizon’s song, Drown.

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Coding

During the Christmas break, I once again decided to change my final piece; I decided that I would recreate a shortened version of the song “Drown” by the band ‘Bring Me The Horizon’. 

This time, I would be using sheet music to aid me with my coding. I got the sheet music from user Michael Udemba on the MuseScore website. To create my piece, I needed to convert the piano notes into MIDI keys (60/c4) along with the piano synth and different arguments and values.

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WIP Performance #2

For my second work in progress performance, I decided that I would recreate another song in Sonic Pi; this time, I based it on the soundtrack from the TV show ‘Stranger Things’. 

Since we were all still new to Sonic Pi, we were allowed to look at other people’s code and change some elements in Sonic Pi and my code was taken from the Twitter page of Kevin Olson.

I changed some parts of his code and added some arguments such as the pan to give it a better effect. Unlike my previous performance, I did some live coding this time; as seen in the video, I changed the synth from dsaw to pluck and finally to piano. I also changed some values on the arguments, although the changes were not as big.

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Coding

In these weeks, we continued working on our performances. 

I decided that I would no longer be recreating “Retreat! Retreat!” on Sonic Pi due to the complexity of the piece and that I may have an issue finishing the piece on time; instead, I would look at different songs to find an inspiration and continue practising using Sonic Pi and further familiarising myself with the arguments that I could use to change the sound of a sample or note to make sure that I will be ready for the second work in progress performance on the 8th of December.

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WIP Performance #1

I thought about what piece I would create and after listening to different types of music, I thought that I would recreate the song “Retreat! Retreat!” by the band ‘65daysofstatic’. I started by working on the intro of the song, which is only a few seconds and then placing it in a loop on Sonic Pi to present in front of the class. Although this intro was very short, I found it somewhat difficult getting the correct arguments for the samples to match the sound from the original song.

I created another piece where I tried putting together different drum samples that were on Sonic Pi as I would need to add drums to my performance in the future. Unlike the first piece, this was just a practice run, so it won’t be part of the final performance.

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Sonic Pi Introduction

This week, we were introduced to Sonic Pi, which will be the main software we would use to learn coding. I’ve done some coding before (mostly using Visual Studio) and I found Sonic Pi a lot more interesting due to the musical element and it is a lot different compared to most coding software.

We started by familiarising ourselves with the UI and once we got the hang of it, we started to make simple sound patterns by making use of different samples, synths, notes, etc. along with arguments. We also had some help from the tutorials and the Sonic Pi cheat sheet to help us understand the different elements in Sonic Pi.

We were also asked to start working on a composition that we would be performing in front of the class on the start of the second term (January 19), although there would be work in progress performances before January to show what we have been working on.

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Course Introduction

At the beginning of the course, we had an introduction on coding in general, such as the different languages, types of code, terms used in coding, etc.