# Computational Approaches to Sound ## Adhavan Mohana Sivaraj 11/10/2021 - 24/10/2021 --- ### Week 1 #### Day 1 ##### Discovering Electronic Music (1983) I love how even from the 80s the possibilities of what they did at a surface level seem new to my eyes. I saw this before The New Sound of Music which seems to be a in depth purview into electronic music. ##### The New Sound of Music (1979) I had no context to understand electronic music from. Even your regular music composition from. The documentary attempts to give us some practical context through showing us the workflows of composers. My assumption about generative art being a phenomenon of the 21st century has also shown to be wrong. They were aware of the impending boom of change in the music industry.... People were self aware of where it was heading. "Don't miss nuclear nightmares" --- #### Day 2 and Day 3 and Day 4 ##### Attempts at making a poster As the balls collide, new balls are spawned and a random frequency oscillator plays. The sound is enveloped and filtered by as a function of mouse X and Y coords. https://editor.p5js.org/adhavan.sivaraj16/sketches/-tZUyA_Fk ![](https://i.imgur.com/WL2LB8X.png) ##### Attempts at emulating the visual aesthetic of a Synth https://editor.p5js.org/adhavan.sivaraj16/sketches/71UV4djBz ![](https://i.imgur.com/NzLTRFf.png) ##### Modifying a previous project This project initially aimed to have the rays emanating from the cursor alikened to a field of vision. The cursor navigates a map and whenever a street-sign is in its field of vision, it tries to read it. If it is a readable street sign, it turns green, otherwise red. This is a map of my neighbourhood and I tagged the street signs as being readable or otherwise IRL by going around. https://editor.p5js.org/adhavan.sivaraj16/sketches/n9kk8Va1f ![](https://i.imgur.com/iZ4eAaS.png) --- #### Day 5 (18/10) ##### Feedback session ###### Samar Appreciate the context that has been included in the poster sketch. You reference an art movement and remake it to fit your thoughts on electronic music. Carries thought. There could have been more initiative taken to integrate all the disparate skills you have learnt in p5 in the context of the drum sketch. ###### Enakshi You have understood and written down in detail a summary of the documentaries which explains your understanding of the earmarks of history. We like how you have played around with composing 2D elements inside p5. Liked those compositions. We would have liked to see you play around with sound in p5 and integrating it with your 2D sketches. ###### Adhavan Great integration of new concepts into past projects and experimentation using the poster and randomization of sound. Could use it more in context of the modular synthesiser. --- ### Week 2 #### Creating a synth I am modifying my previous sketch that had bouncing balls giving birth to balls and producing osunds to have sounds as a function of the position of collision on the canvas. I also attempted to use [Teachable Machine](https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com/train), a google app on the web that allows you to train machine learning models on the web and export and use it in js. While I have used image processing models on p5 before, I have not used pose processing models ever before. I spent a lot of time before I realised that p5 did not have support for teachable machine's pose models directly. I had to train pose models directly using ml.js to use them on p5 and time simply did not allow for that. Using poses would have allowed me to control wind on the canvas intutively, for now, I will stick to the mighty old keyboard to control wind. https://editor.p5js.org/adhavan.sivaraj16/sketches/meP06PeIU ![](https://i.imgur.com/djwiB4O.png) #### Rambles on sound interfaces and applications in the context of computation \[WIP] Date: 2021-10-22 The laws of narrative building exist in all introspective thought. In retrospect, everything is accorded a reason, a cause and an effect is recorded. In The Synthesizer_ Modernist and Technological Transformations in F [^2], all assertions are done in retrospect. [^1] When Busoni and Wagner are referred to as musicians who hated the rigid western scales(Green 2013), and attempted to break away from the 'Wagner' style, they are being pitted as the crusaders who single handedly caused the break, with a couple of others crusaders who are not mentioned in the context. I find it incredibly hard to see history the same way after understanding how easy it is for humans to make connections in retrospect, and simplify complex history to a single 42 page document. Just like how there seems to be the narrative fallacy in looking at the past, there is the fallacy of looking at the future with the usual laws of narrative building. While I have vested interests in what and how I see the future of sound interfaces in my domain of interest, I would like to like remove that fallacy as far as possible, and to introduce a wide range of predictions without substantiation. I shall provide no reason for why I believe that to be a possibility, but rather attempt to build a diverse world in which I describe the possibilities, hopefully removing my contribution to the narrative fallacy and letting the reader's mind involve itself in the game of the fallacy. I will consider this a creative experiment. I shall attempt to do this in two parts, ironcially giving a lot of context in one and attempting to create a context void in the other. There are no Visual Media (W J T Mitchell)[^3] talks about how context is ordained in more than just singular media, I would like to interpret it in the context of this essay. With increasing convergence in digital media consumption into small little rivulets of high density flow, there is demand to eek more out of these rivulets (Social Media giants, phones, smart watches). We constantly want more out of our Netflix suggestions and we talk about apps that should exist but don't. There is certainly a need for more streams from different media to come together and entrance the viewer. As Ruy presents and expands her doctrine of 'sciomnia' to control the masses and Baque who elicits the very 'primal desires' of the men (Very 19th century take on women)[^4], I expand on that to say that sound, and sound interfaces will evolve to be abstracted beyond just being sound interfaces. Any interaction with a digital system carries sound even now, but in the future, I see them as being a network of devices that apply social engineering techniques and complexity science to evolve and control the masses. Very dystopian and very scare mongery, imagine Chewbacca giving a TED talk on this. Slow, thoughtful. Jokes aside, I see it happening because we are at a time where we don't understand the impact we are having through digital devices on the complex fabric of human life. There are emerging behaviours that we cannot rationally explain or control. This is a period in time where we have overreached our possibilities and have messed with social interaction more so than we ever have (obviously, why do I even say that?). But, imagine a time where you have now understood social complexity in humans well enough to compute the exact reaction in society. Where you have the computing power to peek into the future and predict the result of your A/B testing on billions of people down to the exact change in behaviour. Do you want to make people dislike pizza? Are you a vegan who wants to wage information war on the Carnies of the world? (I am a Vegan, I am very much feeling like doing that). If you have, then sound is very much a versatile tool to do so. As Valentine from Kingsmen I learns to elicit and subscribe to the primal interests of humans around the world, (Very Baque) so would somebody else in the future, but this person would possess the same skill but will understand the exact implications of it. Any good villain is always behind the scenes in fiction, so would this master mind of sound be. It is entirely possible that this person is a corporate entity who controls the desires towards certain products by inducing an environment and influencing media in such way using sound that starts off a chain reaction of behaviour across millions of people. Complexity science is an extremely new and incomprehensible field, but, if you can predict a complex chain of events and its outcome, you control thought. Second section: Beep Beep boop boop beep boop beep boop beep boop boop, your phone rings to notify that your last day of Amazon credit has run out. You have not bought enough stuff on the specified national day. Your phone will beep without the function for you to stop it for the whole day. And since you will have to check into work every half hour, it just stays near you. Beeping. Beep beep boop beep boop boop beep. You go about your day, beep beep boop, your wife, while having completed her quota of purchases, still has not completed her google quota of privacy, so her google home sends her random facts every 5 minutes. "Did you know that you cannot see your own prostate?", "Did you know ....."...... The couple end up being annoyed enough to not throw out the trash the next day. The trash man's quota is missing by exactly the couple's quota would have been. The wife of the trash man now has to buy stuff from amazon to get offset credits that'll cover up the husband's. [^1]: Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. 2007. _The Black Swan_. [Place of publication not identified]: Random House Publishing Group. [^2]: Green, Dusin. 2013. _The Synthesizer: Modernist And Technological Transformations In Film Sound And Contemporary Music_. [^3]: Mitchell, W. J.T. “There Are No Visual Media.” Journal of Visual Culture 4, no. 2 (August 2005): 257–66. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412905054673. [^4]: Nicholas C. Laudadio. “‘Sounds like a Human Performance’: The Electronic Music Synthesizer in Mid-Twentieth-Century Science Fiction.” _Science Fiction Studies_ 38, no. 2 (2011): 304–20. https://doi.org/10.5621/sciefictstud.38.2.0304. --- #### Collective reviews ##### Samar He could have worked on labeling and giving the viewer better context on how it works. How do you manipulate the default beat? What is the default freq? ##### Enakshi While she has combined the two oscillators together and created a synth that worked very much to our advantage in our jam session, she could have attempted to understand the working of the FFT(Fast Fourier Transform) spectrum analyzer and visualizer to create interesting visuals with that. The slider could have transitioned smoothly from one waveform to another, rather than acting just like a switch. ##### Anushika The soundscape created by the oscillator was very much unlike any other sounds, which sounded very good in the mix. She could have attempted to understand the processes behind the functions and libraries she attempted to use. This would have helped her troubleshoot the last minute issue that she had with the tracking lib. ##### Adhavan Every time a new ball is produced, it could produce a different sound from previous one. I enjoyed the randomness of the instrument as well as it’s semi human controls that don’t create the same sound twice. The controls were a little obscure, and the sound range could have been more diverse.