Author: Aakarsh Singh

Breakdown: Noah + Aakarsh worked on music mainly. Aakarsh made pt2,3,6,7,8 while Noah made pt 4,5. Nicholas made all the visual effects while the group decided the videos+text to be displayed mostly together. 

Audio Code

Audio

The music is inspired by various hyperpop, dariacore, digicore and other internet-originated microgenres. The album’s Dariacore, Dariacore 2, Dariacore 3 by artist Leroy were particularly the inspirations in mind. People on the internet jokingly describe Dariacore as maxxed out plunderphonics and the ADHD-esque hyper intensity of the genre couple with meme-culture infused pop sampling was what particularly attracted me and noah. While originally starting as  a Dariacore project, this 8-track project eventually ended up spanning multiple genres to provide narrative arcs and various downtempo-uptempo sections.  This concept is inspired by Machine Girl’s うずまき (Uzumaki) , a song that erratically cuts between starkly different music genres and emotional feels. We wanted our piece to have a combination of this song’s composition and a DJ set as our composition. Here’s a description of the various sections: Here’s a description of various sections:

Pt 1: Midwest Emo Family guy + Girls want Girls + 808 Mafia and Metro Boomin Producer tags

Pt 2: Girls Want Girls + Trap (?) drums

Pt 3: Toosie Slide + Jersey Club drums and sfx

Pt 4: Nujabes’ kodama[interlude] + 1980s News 12 Long Island Broadcast + Westside Gunn adlibs

Pt 5: Eightiesheadachetape’s the bowling alley + Playboi Carti’s Long Time – Intro + Pierre Bourne Producer tag + Think Break

Pt 6: Bad Bunny’s Dakiti + Captain Sparklez’s Revenge + Taylor Swift’s Love Story + Baile Funk Drums

Pt 7: Taylor Swift -> Justin Bieber’s Love Yourself Ambient

Pt 8: Playboi Carti’s Shoota + PinkPantheress’s Boy Is A Liar + Crystal Castles’s Kept + Lil Uzi’s Just Wanna Rock + Khaleeji Drums

Viz Code

Viz

For the visuals, we wanted to incorporate pop culture references and find the border between insanity and craziness. We use a combination of real people, anime, and NYUAD references to keep the viewer guessing what’ll come next. I tried to get around Hydra’s restrictions when it comes to videos by developing my own FloatingVideo class that enabled us to play videos in p5 that we could put over our visuals. I also found a lot of use in the blend and layer functions that allowed us to combine different videos and sources onto the canvas.

The underlining of the various intersectionalities that live coding exists between, by performance scholars Matthew Reason and Anja Mølle Lindelof, helped me internalize the multiplicities inherent in this medium we have been practicing. Reason and Lindelof bring up live coding’s position between music studies and media studies, and extend this into the various definitions of the word “live” in this field. They note how music studies views liveness in terms of recording while media studies views it with a focus on transmission. Hence, the exploration of “liveness” that we have been doing over this semester is a nascent concept, with spontaneity, improvisation and performance elements borrowed from multiple disciplines.

The paper later on highlights the somatic and corporeal nature of live coding as well. Viewing our performances from a kinaesthetic lens, the author highlights our physical interaction with the machine:  “a sensorimotor movement vocabulary of micro adjustments, changes, and shifts performed in the frantic keystrokes, in the shuttling of the cursor around the screen, in the flash points of activation and execution”. This brought me back to our discussions regarding adding a performance element to our final showcase. While certain traditional instruments, like a piano or violin, lend a formality to music performances akin to an orchestra, live coding can be seen in the same paradigm as DJing perhaps. Many DJs construct a performance element around otherwise kinesthetically simple action,  like pushing faders and turning knobs, successfully transforming what would be a mundane performance into stadium-selling events.

With an increasing push to opt for specialization in the current economic environment, Artist-Musicians, Musician-Artists by Justin Hoffmann, Sandra Naumann serves to be a calming point for my anxieties. The text served as a great and compact overview of multidisciplinary traditions spanning from the 20th century to early 21st century. Enamored by their descriptions for both artists I had heard about and hadn’t, I was prompted to check out a lot of these pieces while reading. Their highlighting of fashion icons like Vivienne Westwood and club spaces in LES were of particular interest to me, as I had been exploring intersections of fashion and club spaces with media arts in my writings at university over the last few years. The multi-modality of our major, Interactive Media, had always seemed a given to me since I had been engaging with various forms of media together even before I started this degree. The nature of this rabbit hole had always seemed a natural path, as starting out with music led me to start making album covers which led me to start making music videos, and this sequence kept building up till I ended up with video games, installations, websites or short films. However, realizing that this amorphousness of mediums is a relatively new turn of events which was spearheaded by experimental practitioners, I have gained a new appreciation and understanding of the depth of our medium

The segment at the end regarding the ephemerality and spatiotemporal uniqueness of each live coding performance is something that started occurring to me when I started documenting all the work we have been doing in class. I’d often make a recording before class. Then moments before my performance in my class (or even on the spot at times), I’d think of something new and integrate that in the live performance. I’d then scrap my old recording and try doing a “good” take at home only to be frustrated that it never ended up sounding like how it sounded in class, because I triggered a certain line at the wrong cue. This excerpt brings up folk music in the start, and it brings me a certain solace to see this practice in the same light as folk or jazz – ever-changing, improvisational, yet without ever completely destroying the basis of the original. There is a big tradition of folk artists making covers; Bob Dylan famously having made over 200 covers (https://www.whosampled.com/Bob-Dylan/covers). Over this semester, I have tried replicating and covering songs that have been stuck in my head during that week, and once I shift them into this live-coding improvisational paradigm, I often end up with things that are quite new.

With our recent explorations in quantizations, pattern bundlings, A/V syncing and time-based triggering things do get “better” (not sure what the word to use here is, since again it takes away from some of the spontaneity of the performance”). However, this reading did help me get a bigger picture understanding of the linguistics of this medium. I was aware of some general gists like the paradigms of functional programming, something that took me a bit of time to wrap my head around when I tried sharing a state variable between 3 orbit patterns and manipulating it. But even the choice to name certain functions in a particular way (krush/crush) comes from the understanding that the act of writing this code is a performance in and of itself. The “pre-gramming” of some of these languages is done keeping in mind the needs of the programmer and the enjoyment of the audience.

TidalCycles

Hydra

Shader

“I Feel Like I Forget Everything” / Nyquil

Personal reflections on recent realisations regarding memory. Sought to create an ambient evolving set.

Concept/Inspiration

Following 2019’s hibernation, Queeste reappears with the mnestic soundscapes of DJ Lostboi and Torus’ split album The Flash. Across eight gossamer evocations—four from each artist—the duo reflect on individual journeys from airport to sea during the blissful embers of fading summer. Their gaze expands and contracts naturally with passing locations but lingers on the titular flash, what the two artists describe as “the rare sight of the sun giving off a bright green lightburst into the horizon.”

https://queeste.bandcamp.com/album/the-flash

Been listening to a lot of this lately. My focus with my visual work over the last year has shifted to memory and its decay. Have also been composing ambient tracks over the last year to go with it. Wished to implement techniques like granulation, trance gates and filter sweeps.

Sound

Layer 1: “I’m God” by Clams Casino and Imogen Heaps. Sample. Used miClouds and miVerb to space it out. Start a LFO on amp on a triplet grid when Layer 2 kicks in. Pitched up to 1 semitone to D#.

Layer 2: Fade in by accelerating SuperHoover synth to pitch up. Bring in place by making acceleration 0. Arpeggio pitched up to D#. Increased sustain to make sounds bleed into each other. The alternate cycle of arpeggio modes speeds it up during certain parts creating tension and release.

Layer 3: Default guitar sample, arpeggiated. Initally krushed and crushed. When layer 1 and 2 fade out, guitar slows down and crush is removed.

Layer 4: voice memos. Series of iPhone voice memos taken over flights over the last year. Both of the ones used here are JFK to DEL. Striated and formant shifted to create artefacts and simulate data/memory corruption.

Visual

Worked on a gyroid tunnel raymarching shader last semester for a Unity class. Decided to pursue it further, as the imagery of an infinite tunnel scape works with this exploration of memory. Parameters being controlled by midi are tunnel density, tunnel shaping, green value of ambience lighting, time multiplier, fog cutoff and in the end, the blend of my memory. Accentuating and distorting on risers and heavier parts. Empty, sparse – light at the end of the tunnel – during downbeats.

The epistemological survey of live coding through the guise of it being artistic research was a particularly eye-opening exploration of this medium for me. I appreciate these readings, as they help us place live coding – a relatively new practice – in broader contexts and conversations regarding media, art, technology, music, and culture. Live coding existing as a paradigm and a way of thinking at the intersection of all these goes to highlight the novel experimentalism of this language the author highlights. The discussions regarding improvisation, “making mistakes” and play during live coding as forms of experimentation, help me start seeing how we might approach this practice as a live band improv jam/open jam rather than a carefully rehearsed orchestra performance (a mindset I had been approaching this with).

Signal processing and noise in both visual and audio worlds hold a lot of interest for me. I was studying dithering as a part of my shaders class last semester and learned about the introduction of noise patterns to prevent inorganic banding. Similarly, noise helps add an organic texture to a lot of visual work too. In the mastering stage of music production similarly, noise is added to dither the audio and prevent frequency bands that usually generate in electronic music generation. I like how the author’s interest in noise in computer-generated audio even expands to note/pitch order and such. Entropy, chaos, and randomness in the arts are concepts that we have been building upon through previous art movements like abstract expressionism (Pollock’s splattering), Informel, Gutai (Shiraga’s feet paintings or Saburo’s running through paper screens). Hence, the notion of mathematically/computationally introducing them into electronic music synthesis is an exciting one.