Project Report
I will admit that the final product is not how I imagined it sounding a week ago, but it was a great journey nonetheless. This drone piece is comprised of two halves: the “Thick Synth” and the “Chase Synth”. The Thick Synth is the beating heart of the piece and fills most of the low frequencies. The Chase Synth “chases” different frequencies, which are fed to it by the Thick Synth’s sweeping IIRFilter cutoff. In practice it sounds like laser beams zipping around more than a synthesizer chasing a frequency, but it still sounds pleasing due to the dynamic scaling of a very simple distortion effect. Many aspects of the piece are randomly generated, so it is constantly growing and evolving in unexpected ways. The Thick Synth is a vector of oscillators that is being amplitude modulated by a vector of LFOs. Initially I thought this would play with the gain of the individual voices of the sounding oscillator vector, like a mixing desk. Instead each individual LFO works against each other to create a rhythmic beating frequency. The LFO frequencies are randomized one at a time every so often, so the beating amplitude modulation changes over time. The maximum LFO frequency increases over time as well, so the potential for very strong modulation and chaotic beating increases as well. The Thick Synth is also modulated by a sweeping IIRFilter, which fills in the foreground and the mid-range. The Chase Synth is always finding a new random frequency to chase, then starts above or below the “target”, and goes after it at a random speed. Initially I wanted there to be a dynamically scaled delay effect to trigger each time the Chase Synth “catches” its target, but ran out of time to implement a delay effect. If this program was written for a multi-channel format, I would love to hear these chasing lasers spin around the space. The extreme panning might be a little extreme, but I enjoy it. Overall the piece grows very slowly. Most of the features are randomized, so the piece does not develop in a specific direction. Only the Thick Synth grows and shrinks steadily, creating interesting events when a new partial suddenly pops in and changes the amplitude modulation with a new LFO to mix things up. The piece is new journey every time. Expanding and contracting like lungs, each breath is a step in a new direction. A new digital improvisation.