Idea

The main idea behind my composition project was a combination of my previous TidalCycles audio and Hydra visuals demo for Week 2 and Week 3. I really liked the aesthetic of the sunset-beach vibe I had in my Hydra visuals, so I knew I wanted my audio to accompany this feeling of a relaxing, laid-back vibe.

Audio:

My previous TidalCycles demo was me trying to recreate Oh Honey by The Delegations, and I expanded on this idea by mashing it up with Groovin’ by The Young Rascals. The two songs I chose to mashup were songs from the 1960-1970s, and they were R&B/Blues/Soul songs which fit the aesthetic that I wanted to go for.

To mash up the songs, I listened to both songs and picked out elements I liked from both of them. I liked the main theme of Oh Honey more, so I took the bassline, guitars and chords from it. I liked the beat of Groovin’ more, so I took the maracas and clave beat pattern from it, and also included the melody line. Combining the two melodies did not work as well as I expected, as the two songs were in different keys. I attempted to transpose Groovin’s melody into Oh Honey’s G major key, but for some reason it didn’t sound good after the transposing so I kept Groovin’ in it’s original key even though it was off-key as I thought it sounded better. Combining the non-melody beats were much easier as they were non-key specific — drums, maracas, claves.

Visuals:

My previous Hydra demo was similar with a theme of a sunset/ocean view, but I expanded on the visuals from the previous demo by using a modified oscillator shader that starts off with larger bands that becomes smaller towards the end, adding sea reflections, and adding a sky to the background.

The visuals were controlled by three MIDI patterns from TidalCycles. The sun would groove to the melody, the sea to the drum pattern, and the sea reflections were affected by the chord patterns. I left the sky untouched, as I felt that moving too many elements at once might be too chaotic and difficult to discern the beats of the song. In the final version, I think it was easy to identify which element corresponded with which element in the music which I was pretty proud of.

Overall

Overall, I was really proud of my buildup and fadeout of the song, as the beat patterns worked really well when you introduce them one by one or fade them out one by one. I was a little disappointed with the drop, as I couldn’t find a way to make it sound more energetic without making it too muddy and messy, so I left it as it is.