:. Original Compositions

Ok before you listen to any of this, know that I realize some of them are nothing short of garbage. These are all pieces that I composed during my "Introduction to Music Technology" course, which basically covered how to make electronic music (along with some of the DSP/sound theory behind electronic music). The subject matter of most of the compositions was not up to us, and as such, we were limited in what we could create. At the same time, we were encouraged to make "non-traditional" music, which most of this qualifies as. With that disclaimer aside, here are some of the pieces I created (in chronological order of creation):

:. The Rocking Chair

The assignment was to use a single sound and exploit the timbral elements of that to create a 1-2 minute long piece. I chose a squeaking rocking chair. [MP3 Download]

:. Break Recreation

The assignment was to recreate a few drum breaks using non-drum base sounds of our choosing and then modifying them using DSP tricks. For the first, I used a cup hitting a table (for the bass hit), a paper crumbling (for the closed hi-hat), some water sounds (for the open hi-hat), and a hard smacking sound (for the snare) [WAV Download]

For the second, I used a cup hitting a table (again, for the bass hit), a bottle cap dropping (for the wood block sound), crumpling paper (for two sounds: both high and low pitched noise) [WAV Download]

:. First real full composition

This was supposed to be an introduction to sequencing with the keyboard and was pretty open reign. I wanted to create something kind of playful and I think this came out that way, though the timings on some of the notes could use some revision. I was kind of going for a Nintendo game sounding song [WAV Download]

:. This piece comes from a time when robots rule the world

This definitely falls into the "non-traditional music" category. We were supposed to create all the sounds from scratch using sine/square/triangle waves and as well as frequency and amplitude modulation. I made a number of beeps, whistles, bells, and drums from scratch. It definitely has a very futuristic (and repetitive, I know) feel to it. [MP4 Download]

:. Midterm

Another simple 1-2 minute piece. I think by this point I had gotten much better, though I guess beauty is in the eye of the beholder. All the sounds used in here were either synthesized from scratch or created using heavily DSP modified source sounds [MP3 Download]