Assignment #1 : A Short Piece Using Soundmaker, Goldwave, CoolEdit, Protools, Soundhack (or equivalents)
& 1 Sound off the Bregman Website

This assignment is to make a short (about 1 minute) "musique concrete" work using only 1 sound from the selection on sounds website, one of the digital editors (Soundmaker, CoolEdit, GoldWave, ProTools), and SoundHack (or a PC equivalent) for additional processing. The final form of the pieces should be:

• around 1 minute long
• stereo
• AIFF format
• 44.1khz sampling rate

Go to the SOUNDS site from the cc11 front page, and you'll see a list of oddly named short sounds (all AIFF, some stereo, some mono). Listen to them (you'll have to drag them over to your machine first, unless you have some sort of web-AIFF player), and pick one -- any one, it doesn't matter. For this assignment, the source sound itself is not important, it's what you do with it.

Make an interesting, inventive, technically brilliant one-minute (more or less) piece using only that sound. Use cutting and pasting, clever editing, overlaying, etc. Use Soundhack or features of the programs for soundfile processing (of the whole thing or pieces of it, or aggregates of it that you create in Soundmaker and the other editors), and make a pallette of sounds to work with. Use the sound editor to edit and mix all your sounds into the pieces. Or, try to use these programs in innovative ways perhaps counter to your intuition about how they should be used.

Before you start: What's important is to try and let some kind of overall sense of what the piece should be inform your choices of what to do with the individual sounds. It's fine, and important, to play, experiment, and fool around semi-intentionally, but it's also important to combine that with large- or small-level intentionality. Don't just slap together ten sounds that kind of sound neat by themselves, they probably (almost definitely) won't sound neat as a "piece", and that's what we're trying to accomplish.

Use your imagination! Cut, paste, mix, slow down, pitch change, echo, recontextualize, convolve, morph, varispeed, fade &emdash; all are possible, and in lots of combinations. Try to make the most out of the least: lots of effects are not necessarily best. Keep it elegant, clear, and have a real "compositional" plan. It might help to consider how you would make a visual collage out of just a few objects, or an abstract painting out of a few colors. Change the concept of space to that of time, and you have a nice metaphor to work from if you've never tried to make a piece of music before.

The actual sound(s) you choose to use in your piece (remember, only 1) is not really the issue. We know all these sounds pretty well, so just hearing them is not very interesting. The art of your piece will occur in how you combine and transform sounds, how you plan out the work to make some kind of (musical or artistic) sense out of sonic transformation.

One thing to consider is your approach to semantic content and connotation. One hearing of a piece that makes a simple joke with the semantics of a sound (especially one that has a strong, definite context, like speech) is cute: later hearings can be cloying and call attention to oversimplified aesthetic imagination. In other words, don't let whatever you think the sound refers to imbue too much to your piece. This assignment is about your ability to transform and transcend, not highlight. For example, a piece which used a Bart Simpson quip is only interesting if it actually is funnier and more interesting than the Bart Simpson line, not if it needs the inherent humor in the original to supply the piece's interest.

Even more importantly, don't try to make something that you think sounds like what others might consider "music." Rather, let your intuition and creativity loose and make something that is interesting and expresses some sonic idea that YOU have. Have fun with the compositional end of it.

• Pops and clicks! If sounds are edited in their middles, without fading to zero (even very quickly) rather nasty artifacts occur which are the result of instantaneously beginning a sound at some positive amplitude, which doesn't happen too often in this universe. Watch your edits, and get good at fade-in fade-out envelopes (even 20 ms. or so is fine for most things to avoid this kind of problem).
• Having one dynamic level for the whole piece (go for foreground, background, subtle mixing, fading in, fading out, etc.)
• Oversaturation and clipping. Probably the single most common problem with these pieces is mixing sounds together whose numerical sum is greater than the number of values allowed by a computer. This will cause the numbers to just "clip", producing digital distortion. It's not easy to avoid doing this, you can't mix two fully normalized sounds together (you'll then get numbers twice as big as the computer recognizes). You have to worry about this all the time -- when to normalize, amplify, attenuate, and so on. You don't want the signals to be too weak, but definitely err on the side of caution. Weak signals are not great, but clipped signals are BAD. There should be no pops, digital clipping, or really nasty unwanted sounds in the piece (that will largely affect your grade).
• On a more subtle level avoid, if you can, what would seem like technological cliche.
• You can assume that backward sounds that sound like backward sounds, or in fact any sound which simply calls one's attention to the simple technological effect used to create it, is, by definition a cliche!
• Don't make your piece a catalog of simple, one-pass effects.
• Don't be afraid (or too lazy) to process processed sounds.
• Try to not be subjected to the technology, but rather, have it realized your own visions. While the effects in Soundmaker and Soundhack can suggest sonic ideas, they shouldn't be the sonic ideas in and of themselves.
some more tips on soundmaker usage

See the detailed instructions on the CC11 front page for where to put the assignments, and how to name them.

Your pieces should be about 10 megabytes (give or take 1 or 2 megabytes). If it's not, you have the wrong sampling rate, wrong number of channels, or something else is screwed up.

To illustrate the above:

• 1 second of sound, 1 channel, is 44.1k x 2 bytes = 88.2k
• (each sample is 16 bits, one byte is 8 bits)
• 2 channels = 176.4k bytes
• (stereo!)
• 60 x 176.4k = 10584000 or 10584k or 10.5 megabytes = 1 minute

Watch out for ProTools — ProTools "sessions" are NOT soundfiles, you need to "bounce" the session to a soundfile.

I had some students asking about pops and clicks. Here are three sound files that exemplify some problems that may occur while editing and processing your sounds.

Look at the examples (attached) that I've  made with a piano sample.

• PianoOK this is the original piano sample, without problems;
• PianoMiddleClick see (?) if you can hear the difference. Here I made a simple cut in the middle of the sound, and the result is a click;
• PianoClick+TooLoud this is the same as the previous clicked file, but I made an exaggerated amplification (and this can happens as side-effects of other processes as well). Try to hear the distiortion in the attack of the piano sound.

• be careful when you're dealing with amplitudes (amplifying)
• when playing around with different parameters of a specific processing, pay attention to how these parameters influence the final amplitude of the output sound;
• use fades in and out in the beginning and end of sounds you cut, copy, paste;
• trust in your ears, and use them as one of the main tools to evaluate the results.

 some informal thoughts from students in previous years who've done this assignment

spring, 2003
2000