1. Title: Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy (6:56)
2. Description: The piece is composed entirely of audio tracks that I used Ableton to tinker with so much that they are barely recognizable from the original files. My favorite technique I used to accomplish this involved pitch-shifting and transposing the clips to extremes. The pitch-shifting made it sound a lot like I used MIDI, but there is no MIDI in the piece at all. I put Beat Repeat, Ping Pong and Vinyl Distortion on my return tracks, as well as a few other filters on the audio tracks (mostly EQ). I hit a wall when it came to composition – it kept sounding incredibly repetitive and boring. Eventually I took some inspiration from John Cage – since I don’t know the I Ching enough to use it properly, I just closed my eyes, clicked around the Arrangement view and deleted chunks of my arrangement just to see if something inspiring came out of it. What came out was so awesome I decided to use it. Now it reminds me of how I used to feel when I was little and playing Yoshi’s Island World 1-7, “Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy.”
3. Originality: I would give it an 8 out of 10. Four of the eight audio clips I used were from those that were shared by classmates (Jesse’s dirty rhythm loop, Igor’s ringing lamp, Chris’s straw flute, and Myra’s bell), but I distorted and changed them so much that they sound nothing like the original stuff. I’m also pretty convinced that no one’s piece sounds anything like this.
4. Screenshot 1 shows Arrangement View and some of the stuff I did to the Dirty Rhythm Loop. Screenshot 2 is in Session View and shows an example of the transposing work I did on Igor’s lamp clip.
5. The final track can be found at www.rpi.edu/~blancj/comp_music under the title “Touch Fuzzy, Get Dizzy.” There is another track there called “Tracks and Results” that has all of my samples followed by what they sound like after processing. It’s about a minute long, due to the space between each clip.
Filed under: Final Project Postings
