RLPF.ar

Students have final exams next week, so this is the last week of lessons. By now, we're just talking about what the students will do for their major exam pieces, making it a bit more relaxing for me.

I did assign a separate exam project for my audio lecture class. Last year, I gave the students more freedom to decide the style of music, but the result was that the students relied too much on MIDI composition and didn't exercise the audio editing and mixing techniques covered in my class. So this time, they have to mix down vocal and instrument tracks that have been separated out from a hip-hop track by DJ Vadim called "Ballistic Affairs." The stems* come from the really exciting ccmixter website, which hosts raw, separated tracks that are ready for remixing. DJ Vadim made these tracks available under the Creative Commons license (free, non-commercial use).

"Ballistic Affairs" is crazy, amazing stuff. Throughout most of it, two, three or four voices are rapping or singing simultaneously, a riot of vocal activity that is almost chaotic at times. We're several steps beyond stupidly simple gangsta rap. Not only are the individuals' rhymes detailed and sophisticated, but then they're overlaid to make it even more anarchic. This creates a specific mixing challenge that is very good for the students: how to draw focus to one of the voices at each moment. Without this attention, it just sounds sloppy, but if it's done right, the listener always knows exactly who to pay attention to. The parts cooperate, rather than compete.

I'm really tempted to do an electro-house remix, but it will be some months before I could commit any time to it.

* The individual tracks are not exactly "stems," meaning the completely separate tracks. Some of the vocals and instruments are pre-mixed. It's still difficult enough to work with *evil grin*

Other work: I've been planning on an interactive-media workshop for the students for some time, but really struggled with the search for software. Scheduling limitations mean that we can't have too many sessions; it's not realistic to teach all the students who might be interested everything they need to know about Pure Data, Max/MSP or SuperCollider. I considered using VST instruments, driving them by MIDI messages from SuperCollider, but that added another software layer, raising the risk of crashes.

Then I remembered a SuperCollider extension called Hadron. Using it, I could write higher-level plug-ins to give to students access to more complex kinds of audio processing without the need to teach them the intricacies of code, but they could still patch the plug-ins together in new ways, using a graphic interface that is easier to understand. Webcam data are already coming into SuperCollider, making for a simpler software environment.

The catch: Hadron has the appearance of a project that was started and abandoned. It didn't take long to find some major bugs, but it turned out not to take too much work to fix them. It will only get easier as I learn the code base.

So, Spring Festival will be busy -- fixing bugs, adding new plug-ins, composing -- but should be fun anyway.