Callie’s Page


This is my blog from my first semester at ITP. I have since switched to a Notion blog which you can view here.


Fall 2024


Intro to Physical Comp:



Intro to Comp Media:



Hypercinema:






Week 10 → Compose


I’ll admit that music is not one of my primary creative interests, and I know next to nothing about sound design. There’s so much to dive into here, and it felt a little daunting. 

Despite my knowledge gaps when it comes to music theory, it was interesting to learn the very basics. I wanted to challenge myself to play around with the oscillators and synthesize something from scratch.  

My idea was to try to create synthetic “forest sounds” - almost like a white noise machine. To me, the basic components of a nature soundtrack would include the sounds of birds, insects, and frogs. 

I kind of hate the end product - it is very unpleasant to listen to, pretty much the opposite of a soothing nature soundtrack. but sort of interesting from a creative perspective. Maybe there’s something there about uncanny valley? An artifical re-creation never matching the real thing? Or maybe it would just take a more talented composer to pull off...  🐦‍⬛🪲🐸

This sketch doesn’t do anything when played, but it’s where I created the oscillators that I ultimately created to make my sound composition. 


To make the bird sound, I created a few variations in chirp styles to play in succession. The functions shortChirps() and longChirps() sweep upwards within a frequency range, while downChirps() sweeps down. 

I looked up the frequency of a typical bird sound, which is between 1000 and 8000 Hz. This is a pretty big range, so I just messed with the numbers until they sounded kind of correct. 

I created the Bird() function to call those three chirp functions in a pattern. 

ChatGPT helped create the delay() function to add pauses in the patterns. Not sure if there is a better way to accomplish pauses! 

AI also introduced the idea for the Bugs() function to use a second silent oscillator that helps modulate the volume of a sound-producing oscillator. This creates a pulsing effect that sort of sounds like cicadas/crickets in the background. 

The Frog() function takes a similar approach, but also places the sound in an envelope to create a distinct croak, then repeats the croaking noise with pauses in between.  
function longChirps(){
  osc.start();
  osc.amp(0.3, 0.05); 

   for (let chirp = 0; chirp < 3; chirp++) {
    for (let freq = 6000; freq < 8000; freq += 20) {
      osc.freq(freq);
      delay(5); 
    }
    delay(100); 
  }

  osc.amp(0, 0.05); 
  osc.stop(0.1); 
}




I was struggling to compose and layer the multiple oscillators in the same sketch since calling the functions would just cause them to play in succession. There must be a better way to play multiple oscillators at the same time, but what I ended up doing was recording each sound as a Voice Memo, loading them into a separate sketch, and layering them there. 

You can listen to the final composition on this sketch (warning, it’s pretty high frequency and not super fun to listen to).