Group Members: Eadin, Omar, Sarah

For our drum circle project, we started by getting together and deciding on the kind of feel and impact we were going for. We all agreed that an ambient sound matched with a retro look is our goal. Then, we went through our previous projects and found sounds that we already like or feel like would suit what we want to do. Then we experimented with them and tried new stuff. 

For our workflow, we didn’t particularly divide roles. Instead, we would meet in our usual classroom, jam, and give tasks to each other as we worked. But in general, Sarah focused more on audio and compositional structure, Omar did more with visuals, and Eadin looked more into audio and midi interaction. 

Working in a group this time has been an exciting experience, as it felt like we had more possibilities with 3 brains focusing and trying to put something together. It was also helpful to learn from each other and see how each of us tackles issues that came up with the code. Having more than one person genuinely helped with debugging as we tend to overlook the problems with our own code but with flok we had to resolve everything to make sure we had something on the screen. However, improvising from scratch remains a little bit of a challenge. We all found ourselves to be interested in kicking off our performance with something already complex and building on top of it every time we meet, which still does not leave much room for improvisation and chance. Hopefully, through the class-wide drum circle, we would see how others jump in and contribute, getting some examples of unplanned improv.

For next week’s assignment, although we already kind of developed a build-up this week, we are thinking of trying something new and playing with new sounds, maybe bringing in our own vocal samples!

Here’s a snippet of the composition code we attempt to live code with:

d8 $ qtrigger 8 $ seqPLoop[
--
(0,9.5, off 0.125 (# squiz 4) $ fast 1 $  s "sid" >| note (scale "minor" ("<[3,5,7] [4,2]>(5,8)"+"<2! 3 4>"+"f")) # gain (range 1.2 1.3 perlin) # room 0.5 # djf (range 0.3 0.4 perlin) #hold 0.1 # size 0.9),
(4,9, loopAt 1 $ sound "breaks125:1(5,8)" # legato 7 # room 0.25 # vowel "o"),
--break // everything off to build tension
--- come back faster / build up-ish
(12,13, s "gab:9(40,8)" # gain (range 0.5 1 saw) # speed (range 0.8 2 saw) # cut 1),
(11,12, s "cp*4" # room 0.6),
(12,13, s "cp*16" # room 0.6) ,
(13,24,off 0.125 (# squiz 4) $ fast 1 $  s "sid" >| note (scale "minor" ("<[3,5,7] [4,2]>(5,8)"+"<2! 3 4>"+"g")) # gain (range 1.2 1.3 perlin) # room 0.5 # djf (range 0.3 0.4 perlin) #hold 0.1 # size 0.9),
(13,23 , loopAt 1 $ sound "breaks125:1(5,8)" # legato 7 # room 0.25 # gain 0.8),
--still needs a smoother breakdown/slow down--
(24,30, off 0.125 (# squiz 4) $ fast 1 $  s "sid" >| note (scale "minor" ("<[3,5,7] [4,2]>"+"<2! 3 4>"+"f")) # gain (range 1.2 1.3 perlin) # room 0.5 # djf (range 0.3 0.4 perlin) #hold 0.1 # size 0.9)
]