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# System prepended metadata

title: CAS Workshop Report

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# CAS Workshop Report
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Gaargee Athavale
DMA (Year 3, Semester 5)
October 2021

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## Table of Contents

[TOC]

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## Week 1
### Day 1 (11/10/2021)
#### The new Sound of Music
##### BBC Documentary
* Gave a basis for the rise of electronic music in the UK.
* It showed the process of recording, and the danger that was presented by the steel tapes, and then mitigated by the plastic ones.
* The culture of making music in the early 1970's with anything that could make sound. 
* How the sound was looped in between two tape recorders to make one man sound like an opera.
* Introduction to Robert Moog and his voltage control oscillator, and how it revolutionised electronic music.
* How the Doctor Who theme was made, which is intriguing because it sounded like they had used atleast a dozen instruments for it.
* How the new instruments like the barrel organs and the pianolas came into being.
* How the early manipulation of sound was done with the recorded tape and a razor blade.
* The sheer size of the equipment is astounding.
* It was interesting to see the process through which the scores were made, especially the conversation between the director and the score-maker, for the victorian opera score.
* This was mostly form a british vantage point. 
* I liked this documentary for its unique british perspective and the access they had to the best equipment of that time. 
* I think this documentary focuses more on the evolution of electronic music rather than why it became popular.
* I would have liked to see more of working british musicians.


##### Discovering Electronic Music
* It is a documentary on how the advancement of technology seeped into music to make a genre of electronic music.
* The documentary shows how electronic music is different from acoustic music.
* It made comparisons within a) the sounds produced and b) the time between composing and playing a piece.
* Electronic music has virtually no limits when it come to the sounds you can make. One is not restricted to the 12 main notes. Any kind of sound can be made with a little experimentation and messing around with the different knobs on the modulators or synthesizers.
* When writing a piece of traditional music, the composer would have to wait for a long time to see how it sounded when actually played rather than on a piece of paper.  With electronic music, you can test out the notes instantly, and make different iterations of the song and see which one you like better.
* This documentary concentrates more on how electronic music came to be rather than the people than were involved in it. It focuses on the origins, equipment, and sounds of this new type of sounds. 
* Rather than finding famous people, it showcases people who operate the equipment competently to make sounds, as well as some people who invented their own machines at home, and had home studios to pursue their passion of electronic music.
* It was eye-opeing about the more gritty aspects of electronic music and how much commitment it took for you to pursue this passion.
* While the BBC Documentary concentrated more on the culture around making sound and how it was used, this one focused more on why electronic music came into being, so i was more interested by this one.

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### Day 2 (12/10/2021)
#### Poster for class
* This was a very experimental piece as I had not used p5.js before this. 
* I have mostly stuck to pictures here, and tried out different filters and blend modes till I found something I liked. 
* I was trying to show the equipment used as well as the element of sound waves that have to be manipulated to create these non-traditional sounds.

Links to the images and the font I used:
* https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/where-do-sound-waves-end-up/
* https://www.soundonsound.com/people/dr-robert-his-modular-moogs
* https://www.dafont.com/jmh-typewriter.font


##### Final Poster
![](https://i.imgur.com/mWSzxhb.png)

##### Link to Poster:
https://editor.p5js.org/Gaargee/sketches/JP80ifmNi


#### Oscillator Sketch
* It was tedious work, especially since the mouse/coordinates stopped showing for a bit.
*  I was getting frustrated while changing the colours, so I made variable to change all the components' colours at the same time. 
*  The sketch is a redraw of the Sputnik Modular Oscillator. I have attached both pictures.(The reference and the sketch)
Link to Sketch:
https://editor.p5js.org/Gaargee/sketches/sStxgILkI





|    Reference Picture   |       Final Sketch  |
|:------------------------:|:-------------------:| 
|![](https://i.imgur.com/q3qDwcZ.jpg)|![](https://i.imgur.com/I26qjy4.png) | 


---

### Day 3 (13/10/2021)
#### I Dream of Wires (Part 1)
* It is focused on the modular synthesizer.  Its rise, death, and rebirth.
* We see the differences between the ideologies of the east and the west coast, and how these gave way to two of the earliest modular synthesizers. The Moog synthesizer and the Booklah synthesizer. The Moog was connected to the traditional keyboard and was based in the traditional western scale from where you could manipulate the sound. The Booklah was more unpredictable and was connected to tough sensors which made it less recognizable and intuitive to use. 
* The next was the album that was made using the synthesizer. The switched-up Bach album was a hit with audiences because eit was something that was easily recognizable to the common public as opposed to ‘Silver apples of the moon’ that was pure electronic music. These two factors were instrumental in making the Moog synthesizer the standard.
* These were however not available to the common populace because of their price tag.  The mini Moog was a blessing for the working musician, and many companies followed suit in an effort to appeal to a wider audience outside of serious composers and universities with deep pockets.
* The beginning of the end, I thought, was when they introduced presets. These put an end to the experimentation of making a sound, and instead people just accepted that these were the sounds that could be made and did not ponder it further. It reduced the possibilities of sounds that could be made and had the same problem as acoustic music – the limited sounds. It defeated the whole reason electronic music became revered in the first place.
* This is exactly the reason why it bounced back. The unlimited possibilities of sounds to be discovered and made were lost when the presets and mini synths were made, so people looking for something different and new looked back to the thought obsolete modular synthesizer.
* It makes sense to me as to why people were drawn towards the smaller portable synths like the DX7, and also why some people stuck to the old analog synths, but now that we have software to record or make sound and manipulate it, I do not think we have a need for the the big bulky modular synths now.
* This documentary also explored how society was affected by the invention of the synthesizer and how social and economic conditions affected the development of electronic music, which is what most of the others skimmed over it.

| ![Notes](https://i.imgur.com/BAi4WBh.jpg) |![Notes](https://i.imgur.com/XGuyeVk.jpg) |
| :--------: | :--------: | 
|  ![Notes](https://i.imgur.com/NytPCmv.jpg)  | 


---

### Day 4 (16/10/2021)

#### Oscillator
* It was pretty easy to make a sound, the button was a bit harder. 
* I struggled with the slider as the values seemed to be random on it. 
* I think i figured out the frequency slider but not the amplitude slider. 
Link to Sketch:
https://editor.p5js.org/Gaargee/sketches/x92ZtsSWs

#### Envelope
* The connecting part was easy, although I haven't played with filters yet. 
* The hard part was figuring out how to stop it from looping it. The noLoop() function worked.
* I tested out the filters by putting different values in the resonance and switching between highpass and lowpass filters.
* I wanted to hear the same sound with the filters on them, so I made two buttons which show the same sound, with the same frequency, waveform, resonance, and amplitude passing through highpass and lowpass filters.
Link to sketch:
https://editor.p5js.org/Gaargee/sketches/mDE3Oleg8

#### Bouncing Ball
* I wanted to play around in p5.js a littl more, and especially something about animation and loops that hadn't done in p5.js.
* I made a simple bouncing ball using variables.
* I messed around a bit with the colours as well.

Link to Sketch:
https://editor.p5js.org/Gaargee/sketches/W7hSWUjQm

---
### Week 1 Reflection
* I had never done p5.js before this class, and i didn't have any exposure to electronic music besides some effects control in Audition.
* The documentaries were really informative introductions to what electronic music is, how it came and being and why it got famous.
* Although some of the technical stuff went over my head, the machinery and the sounds were very intriguing.
* It gave me more context for this class, and I was really excited to start making some sounds.
* The assignments in p5.js were challenging in the beginning mainly because i didn't know what I was doing.
* The class and the reference page helped a lot, but I fumbled with all the new terms a lot.
* It got easier when I started to see the patterns and how to connect all the different things together.
* Ultimately, this week gave me some context for electronic music, and a crash course in the basics of p5.js.

---
## Week 2

### Day 5 (19/10/2021)
#### Peer Review
* We started the day off with peer reveiw, where we discussed what we had done for the past week and gave feedback and suggestions.
* Everybodys work was amazing and it was really fun to see what everybody had been upto, and I was eager to get feedback for my work.

#### The Shape of Things that Hum
* This a documentary that involves interviews of music journalists, composers, bands, producers and recording studios that talk about the various electronic music intruments that helped shape it as it is today.
* There were a few instruments that caught my attention in the documentary. 
* It talked about how the DX-7 was hard to program and hence it was easily recognisable in the music of the time.
* The fairlight was another with presets as well as a lighpen that would let you change the waveform, as well could record eight tracks at one time.
* I believe that the fairlight was what one of the people in the "Discovering Electronic Music" documentary was using. 
* The roland TB 303 looked like a mini synth, but for drums. 
---

### Day 6 (19/10/2021)
* I started working on my synth today.
* I drew a few sketches to decide my layout and explore the options. 
* Sketches:
![](https://i.imgur.com/3vfATSk.jpg)

![](https://i.imgur.com/0UWF4iz.jpg)

![](https://i.imgur.com/8yvZHUb.jpg)
* One was an effects control panel where you could mess with pre loaded sound tracks. The other was an interactive synth and the third was an instrument simulator that would have tabla and a keyboard. 
* I chose to go with the interactive synth as it looked the most interesting and seemed like something I would be able to finish by the end of the class.
* I added frequency and amplitude knobs as well as a wave  form slider that you can use to switch between wave types.
* I am think about adding filters as well, but I will have to see hwo to use them as I'm not sute if everything will work together.
#### Link to sketch:
https://editor.p5js.org/Gaargee/sketches/01XQCnNqw
* I also managed to figure out the amplitude slider on the oscillator that I made in the first week. I did not realise that the values after 1 would remain the same, but it works now that it is set from 0 to 1.
---
### Day 7 (20/10/2021)
* I continued to work on the synthesizer. I realised that the envelope would override the frequency and amplitude knobs, so i did not add it.
* Instead, I'm planning to add a delay effect.
* I've made sliders and connected it to the oscillator, but it doesnt seem to work so far.
* I also strated reading the "Sound like a Human Performance" resource given to us.
* It seems to be discussing the views of different people regarding machines replacing human musicians to create sound.
---

### Day 8 (21/10/2021)
* I figured out how to make the delay work, but now the filter is not working. (Interactive synth)
* I read through the one of the readings provided "The Synthesizer: Modernist and Technological Transformations in Film Sound and Contemporary Music".
* The part I found the most interesting from it was the divide that the invention of the synthesizer brought with it in both the music and the movie industry.
* The music was divided into rock and electronic, but the gap was eventually bridged with rock starting to make use of electronic equipment.
* Similarly, in film, the divide was between the traditional score and electronic score. Dissonant and contemporary are used to describe the latter. 
---

### Day 9 (20/10/2021)
* I made three different filters and connected them to the oscillator instead. 
* While there is a bit of the problem loading the code (it takes a while for the correct sound to come), the filters are now working as is the delay.
* I finished my essay on how electronic music is relevant to me. 
* I wrote about the scope of electronic music, specifically the scope for imaginative sounds and freedom for experimentation, and how video games provide both of these due to their iteractivity and varying playthrough times.

#### Link to my finished interactive sketch:
https://editor.p5js.org/Gaargee/sketches/zKBjKTVtN
[Sliders are missing from the image]

![](https://i.imgur.com/BIbxWi2.png)

#### My essay:
![](https://i.imgur.com/jTE4oew.jpg)
![](https://i.imgur.com/MuwH481.jpg)
Citations:
* https://www.denofgeek.com/games/cyberpunk-2077-soundtrack-music-listen-free/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Red_Dead_Redemption_2#Production_and_composition
* The Synthesizer: Modernist and Technological Transformations in Film Sound and Contemporary Music
* https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/the-making-of-red-dead-redemption-2-soundtrack-766210/
---
### Day 10 (23/10/2021)
* We presented our work with the whole class. 
* It was really nice to see what everybody had been working on for the whole week. 
* Everybody had made different things from the prompt of interactive synthesizer. 
* I want to see how the waveform visualiser was made. 
* I also want to add a button to loop the sound now that would toggle the loop on and off.
* The jam session after was one of my favourite moments of class. 
* Some decent tracks came out  once we figured out how to record it.
---

## Week 2 Reflection
* This week built on what I had learnt last week both in terms of context and programming.
* The synth needed me to know specific contexts in more depth, and how to connect two different concepts together.
* One example is that I had to connect the filter to the delay once I connected the oscillator instead of connecting both to the same thing. 
* Tiny things like these are what were confusing and were stopping the synthesizer from working. 
* I also read some of the text that were posted on blackboard.
* One talked about how people thought modular synthesizers were replacing human mucicians. 
* The other was about how the invention of the synth helped the evolution of the music and the movie industry.
* They were very interesting reads, and added more perpspective to what I had learnt in the first week.
* I really enjoyed this workshop. It was different from most clasess and I got to learn a lot. 