This chapter delves into the interesting idea of the liveness of live coding. I find it very interesting that it is a hotly debated topic, but it is mostly up to one’s own interpretation. Can a live coding set truly be live with pregramming? If there isn’t code there to begin with, is it fine to still make music beforehand, and use those elements in your performance? Is that truly live coding? I find this a really interesting topic because. going into this class, I sort of assumed that in live coding performances were always completely improv, where people work off one another on the fly. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that’s probably not the case always. From my own experience trying to live code, a lot of times there is pregrammed stuff, and if not, stuff that people probably messed around with before a performance. This is what I do, anyway. It takes a lot of skill to know all the sounds and workings of code and coordination to be able to just make something out of nothing on the spot. When I would do improv solos on the saxophone, it’s not like I would be playing stuff on the fly always. A lot of times I would be playing along to the track beforehand, analyzing the chord progressions, the key, listening to other sax solos, and workshopping random stuff until I found things that I thought sounded nice or fit with the sound of the song. That way, when I am doing my actual performance, I can incorporate these small pieces I played into my actual solo. For me, the same applies to live coding. I think almost everyone has to, you are drawing from your own musical influence when you are doing a improv performance no matter what it is, because I’m pretty sure there is not a single person who does improv performances and doesn’t listen to music. So, I believe that there is no issue in pregramming or having pieces of music that are incorporated into a live set. But, if you can do it off the dome like that, kudos to you.
Tidal Sound
The two biggest things I want to have in the pieces that I make are to contain samples and have some sort of cultural tie to me (or just something I am interested in). For this piece I really wanted to find an old Korean song to sample. This would end up proving difficult since I cannot speak Korean whatsoever. After much digging and asking some family members for some old songs they knew, I finally found a song that I liked: 님은 먼 곳에 (Ni-meun Meon Go-se, You are far away I think is the translation?) by Kim Chu-Ja.
After listening to the song a bunch, I eventually tried to take parts of the song I thought sounded nice and tried to put them together. This would prove to be such a pain in Tidal, because I have to find specific timestamps for the entire song and try to make sure they are about one measure. To make this easier, I was able to find the bpm to the song and then multiply that by the speed I set the song to (1.2). After this, it was mostly experimenting to find what sounded good together. Eventually, I found vocals I liked and had them in a pattern I thought sounded good. After this, I put some percussion in just to make the song sound a bit more like a hip-hop/lofi song.
Most of the inspiration for my percussion came from listening to J Dilla’s Donuts and MF DOOM and Madlib’s Madvillainy, trying to emulate percussion patterns they had in a way that would also fit my song. I was deadass listening to Donuts on repeat for like a week straight, just trying to break down in my head how Dilla samples. I also attempted to make my percussion in “Dilla time,” by nudging the snare and the cymbals a bit so they don’t all play at the same time. I especially like the rushed snare that Dilla likes to do, where it comes in just a fraction before the other instruments on the same beat. Since a lot of hip-hop songs are pretty repetitive, I wanted to do the same by just having a long beat that would keep playing with little to no change between measures.
To make my song an actual composition, I wanted to have a beat switch that would be transitioned by some sort of speech. I had a hard time finding inspiration for a speech, so kinda just ripped a speech of some TTS meme that ironically talked about certain negative things that plague today’s society, like microplastics or the conspiracy about 5G radio waves. As for the beat switch, I wanted to have a slowed down tempo that would use the amen break to have a kind of weird breakcore-esque beat. I swapped around the order of some of the samples I had and added some new ones as well to make the second part of the beat. I wanted to add extra sounds to it but I had trouble finding sounds that kinda fit with the overall sound to me. The other difficult part with the break beat is that the beat didn’t totally line up when it repeated, and that I had to manually make the midi beat for it, since it was one long sample. I think I got it close enough, but I know it isn’t perfect either. My ending is kinda bad because it just kinda abruptly cuts out, I wanted to have an xfade but I couldn’t get it to work for whatever reason.
Hydra Visuals
As for my visuals, it took me a long time to find some inspiration for something I thought would sort of fit with the sound that I had created. All I knew is I thought it would be cool to have something really hectic visuals-wise. For both visuals, I ended up taking gameplay of two games I liked: one being a speedrun from the FPS Ultrakill, and the other being a pro match from the card game Magic: the Gathering. While I wanted to have hectic visuals, I also wanted it to have some clarity so you could actually tell what the games were being played. The reason I chose games were because I felt like this, combined with the hectic visuals and the Korean song sample, sort of represented who I am. After tinkering with the visuals for some time, I got the calm and chaotic visuals I wanted and managed to sync up certain visuals to the midi, I was essentially finished with my full composition.
The reading for today was a bit hard for me to understand, I think partially due to my limited knowledge of music theory. While I understand the basics of music and how to read it because of me playing the saxophone for about 10 years, I don’t totally understand the depths of music theory, like knowing which notes or chords can sound good together (I did improv a bit but I did it mostly by ear). It felt like a mathematician was trying to explain how to write music to me, something I am notoriously bad at understanding. I believe the author is trying to explain essentially how to not make “boring” music with the use of computer code as the medium. Rather than having the same looping instrumentals, try to add something more to it, to make it more interesting to listen to. I definitely agree with this point, since most music I enjoy has very good production with varying sounds and extra random sounds added to sort of spice up the composition. However, I also think repetition is not always a bad thing either. For example, in lots of rap or hip-hop songs, there can be a beat that can change very little or not at all through the duration of the song. Perhaps since the instrumentals and production are less of the focus, you can use the same looping beat to put more emphasis on the lyrics. I also believe that repetition can be good in things like video game OSTs, where again, the music is just there to add to the background atmosphere and isn’t necessarily the main focus. Having randomness can add more though, and make a piece more individualistic, and give the opportunity to make your piece sound more unique. Overall, while I found the reading a little hard to understand, I do get the idea the author is trying to put across by not making music too repetitive. While I agree with this in most cases, I don’t think you should outright reject repetitiveness either, because it can also be a good tool in making musical compositions.