It’s another group week! Get organised early so that you can find a time to work with your ensemble.

Group Diary: Create a piece in Gibber with a focus on modulation where each performer has a different role (3min).

You’ve created a few piece of music with Gibber now so you should have a good grasp of the basics. This week you need to go deeper, completing most (if not all) of the tutorials in the Gibber playground. You will need to apply the synth design concept “modulation” in your group diary. Think about all the aspects of a computer music performance: sounds, synths, notes, rhythms, sequences, patterns. All of these things can be distorted, warped, mutated and evolved over time and it’s your job to find ways to do that with your group. When you’re puting your group together, make sure everybody has a different role (although everybody should be modulating something).

Goals for this week#

  1. Dive deeper into the synth designs provided in Gibber (well, in gibberish actually, see below). Create sounds with a synth you haven’t used before such as fm or karplusstrong.

  2. Read through the modulation tutorial and the arpeggios and signals as sequences tutorial and learn about how to create custom modulations for synth parameters and sequences.

  3. Look at the making synths tutorial and create your own synth design in Gibber using the Genish DSP library.

  4. Try the tidalcycles tutorial for a different (some would say better) way of defining sequences in Gibber. The full syntax for tidalcycles mininotation is here.

  5. Use Gibber’s built-in collaboration features to create a group performance with your ensemble!

Resources#

The main resources for this week are the Gibber playground and the built in tutorials. You should try to complete all of the music and sound design tutorials so that you have a grasp of some of the features that are available. Gibber can feel a bit opaque, so here’s the list of different projects it brings together. If you want to try some new sounds quickly, try the “presets” (under #2 below).

  1. The gibber playground: Gibber’s user interface, clone this repo to run Gibber locally.
  2. gibber.audio.lib: Audio components for Gibber, most of this wraps gibberish (see below), but it does include the presets.
  3. gibber.graphics.lib: Graphics components for Gibber.
  4. gibber.core.lib: A few shared objects and function for Gibber, mostly for sequencing. euclid, seq, and tidal are defined here.
  5. gibberish: a “fast JavaScript DSP library”. If you want to know where Synth or Sampler are defined, look here (actually look in gibberish/js/instruments).
  6. genish: this is a lower-level DSP library for doing “per-sample audio processing” (inspired by the gen~ object from Max/MSP). To understand why this is cool, look at the genish tutorial.

Creative Notes#

  • This is your second chance to work with your group. Think about your experience last time. Is there a way to collaborate more effectively and efficiently?

  • It’s a good time to remember that we don’t put people in “boxes” in this course. Nobody is the boss in a laptop ensemble and the best performances will have big contributions from each member. Even if you think you are a beginner, we value your contribution. “Beginner’s mind” can sometimes be an advantage for creativity.

  • Gibber makes it quick and easy to load up advanced synth designs like the monosynth, FM, and karplusstrong synths. Given that everybody has access to these synths, how are you going to sound “unique” in your group?

  • Now that you’ve made a lot of computer music, look back at the examples of laptop ensemble performances from week 1. Do these performance make more sense now?

Videos and Sounds#

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