This week we had to create a sound collage for my computational media class. I didn’t set aside a lot of time to work on it, so it became something of a last-minute project. Today I spent most of my day meeting with bioinformatics folk to discuss herberia and taxa and distributed architectures. I may end up working in a CS research group playing with this (or other) stuff. Anyway, by the time I got home, I only had a few hours to start and finish my project. Luckily, I’ve been toying around with MIDI on my own. So I took a line from J.S. Bach and tried to reconstruct part of his crab canon. (This amounts to reversing, compositing, and normalizing a small bit of data.)
Here’s what I started with.
Two hours later, here’s what I ended up with. True it’s not precisely a crab canon—I prefixed a short introduction before the canon starts proper. But if you played from then on backwards, it would sound exactly the same. That’s right: I one-upped Bach. He thought he was writing a musical palindrome. Unfortunately, he couldn’t reverse the attack and decay of each note. He needed me to come along and help him out with the minor, technical details. There’s no shame in that.
You can even download my project in spiffy MP3 format if you like. I’m just that sort of guy. Giving, courteous, clean.
Crab Canon.mp3Technorati Tags:digital, music, media computation, java, cs110, j.s. bach, crab canon, collage