Sunday, February 22, 2009


Oh man, the legend of Zelda theme on a theremin!!!
This is a classic song (at least from my childhood) played on a not so classical instrument. the theremin is played by moving your hands through by the loop antenna (to adjust volume), and the upright antenna controls pitch.
after googling theremin I found www.thereminworld.com which has a guide for purchasing theremins. I found this discussion really interesting, because before taking this class i really didn't think about how much the quality of instruments, reproduction, and compression really affects the sound. For theremins, probably the most important thing to keep track of is "linearity," which is basically the correspondance between physical distance as you play and the distance between the notes. ( a more articulate definition:"Linearity refers to how uniformly the theremin responds as you move your hands around the antennas." - http://www.thereminworld.com/article.asp?id=31).

Speaking of the quality of sounds, I realized that I never uploaded my notes about radial, so here they is:

This picture on the left was the first step of my process. All four tracks were the original click file, with the pitch and tempo adjusted as such. The effect i used was deep bass, but i don't know how much of an effect it had. I then outputted a few seconds of this, and fed it back in, following my excellent TA Hillary Charnas' advice. I named the file clicks v2,1 and then cleared the tracks, and started a new one with clicks v2,1 as the basis.

On the right is my completed composition, but before I reached that is when I encountered the issue of quality, as the 24bit aiff file that I had bounced from logic (after I pulled in the radial output file) was of much worse quality than the actual radial loop symphony. I puzzled over what to do, and just decided to bounce it again, this time to a 320 kbps mp3 file. I accidentally added it to the second track, while leaving the 24-bit aiff version on the first track, and when they sounded together, a new hybrid sound was created with the grittiness of the aiff and cleanness of the mp3 file. It was good. I added the orignal clicks file into the third and fourth tracks, one totally normal, and one sped up with higher pitch. No external effects where used at all for this second step of Dance Beat 2.

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