Final

Joshua Brancazio

In this studio, we turned Earthquakes into music in order to give voice to this natural phenomenon. We wanted to focus on giving earthquakes a different spin and perception. Instead of earthquakes being seen as natural disasters that hurt people, we created a song that demonstrates the complexity and intrigue of earthquakes that are not normally seen. By turning a series of two thousand earthquakes in a 2-week period into individual notes, we created a song that shows the unseen side of earthquakes. The magnitude, and other values correlating to earthquakes, determine the pitch, duration, and velocity of each note.

"Quake" is a musical composition that captures the intricacy and power of earthquakes. The song begins with the sound of an earthquake, low and rumbling. Notes start to play, scattered and sporadic, but as they increase in volume, they become more continuous, and form a melody. This part of the song shows the calm before the storm, but soon, a distorted version of those notes and disrupts the peace. The distortion is imposing, yet awe inspiring. Eventually, the rhythm tracks comes in, and pull composition together as they give it depth and movement. The rhythms show that there is a pattern to the chaos of earthquakes, but every so often, one of the rhythm tracks will differ, showing that there is entropy within the pattern. Later in the composition, the beats drop out and the bass gets louder to express the raw power and force behind earthquakes.

Our song "Quake" in an expressing of the many facets of eathquakes- the melodic patters that appear in the seemingly random notes show that there is some structure to seismic activity, but the overlying, rumbling, unstoppable rolling earthquake noises in the backround demonstrate that, at their core, earthquakes are a powerful force of nature.

Presentation

Nathaniel Tong and 2 OthersCarlos Alvarenga
Joshua Brancazio

process

Carlos Alvarenga

The whole studio was about the way to visualize data from a musical point of view. At the very beginning we tried to figured out what kind of data would provide us a interesting piece of music. we wanted to be something different, something that maybe nobody would expect to look from a music perception. we thought that using the differents constellations of stars as our data would be a nice approach for the project at the same time we talked about using crime rates, this one was a strong candidate to use for our project, at  the beginning was an enthusiastic idea but then we decided that it would it be unic to use live-time data, so in that way the composition would be even more interesting and complex. Then we came up with this idea to use earthquakes live-time data, it was perfect and fulfilled all the expectations that we were looking for, and that's the one that we adopt as our group goal. 

In order to progress in the project we had to get used to use the different programs as Ableton and Max MSP, and the escential part of turning data into music notation, for then edit it in Ableton to give all the effects that we wanted. As the process of searching for data in real time, we realised that it wasn't that easy as we thought it would be, and even worse the programing of a pitch in Max that allows us to interpretate the real time data would take us too long, and we were running out of time, so we had to move into something more basic and consice that we can reach in the precise time, so we decided to not use real-time data.

Once we found our data chart, we continued working on the pitch in Max to turn the data in a midi file. then we got the midi file ready to be edit in Ableton. we decided to work in differnt compositions individualy, and at the end we were gonna join them or pick the best.  

The first composition that we came up with was pretty good, it actually had some rhythm wich is really complicated if you are using a total random data set as your musical standars, the bad thing about this prototype was that it was to simple and clearly there were too many things in it that we can improve to make it better, also it was too long we needed to make it shorter and more complex. what we changed was that we decided to cut the midi file in half and play the two parts at the same time, this made the composition more consice.

Another thing that we changed was the pitch for Max, the first itch allowed us to made the what we wanted in the most basic way, but then we decided to improved in order to give us more possibilities to edit it.

The second composition that we came up with was the one that lead us to the final thing. the good thing about this was the time and a lot of cool effects that contained, the only thing that we add to it was some real earthquakes effects, and that we finished.