I was really interested in the BBC site, and the super wide range of recorded audio that it had available on it.  The prompt for this project, where we had to mash up  a lot of sounds, reminded me of the opening sequence of Jack Stauber's Baby Hotline. So, I wanted to compose a piece based off of telephone dial sounds, and wanted to see if I could construct one completely out of them, if I could. It was a little harder than anticipated, so rather than something musical, I opted for a more of narrative kind of thing: someone dials up a phone call to a busy office, the phone call makes it through a bunch of phone lines to a single one, someone picks it up, the person on the line starts nagging, and the cacophony of phones rings out again, before the person who answered hangs up. Most of the narrative elements come from the cycle of irritation and relief that come from when the multiple ringing phones are there and when they are not there. I also was pleasantly surprised to find out that the comical tiny voice on a phone call sound effect was actually something recorded by the BBC and available in high quality for use.

While the intention was for the phone ringing sounds to be grating and somewhat irritating, I did layer them in a way so that they had somewhat of a rhythm. I took different dial tones from different eras, and looped them along with some dialing sounds from old phones to sound like typewriters. I also got some ambient sounds from an office to add just a bit more background to the louder portions, and accentuate the quiet portions. The constant noise also does make the final silence of the piece very welcome.

I do have to say that, in all , I am definitely more confident in using Reaper and will probably have an easier time with the next project.

Phone Call

I've always ben a big fan of synthesizers and the range of sounds they can make, and I've got a really large feeling of nostalgia whenever I hear them.  Most of the time, I'm reminded of the water levels in old video games. for this project, I took inspiration from that nostalgia to make something that somewhat resembles that, but with more of a clear ending and beginning, than a loop that plays over and over.
My storyboard essentially depicts a person dreaming, in which he is suspended in water and just floating. The storyboard flips between different angles of a single character, which is designed to be when my song has different instruments and sounds come in during the song. Because there is not too much interesting going on in the storyboard, I compiled it into a video and animated a few little effects in the images.
My song basically is supposed to emulate old video game music, particularly the style of the water level music in old Mario games. It starts off with a very simple piano loop, merged with a clacking sound to sort of make it feel more concrete, that repeats through the whole piece, before a synth comes in to create the driving melody. Then, more synths and other sounds come in to fill it out the harmony and some sub-melodies, sort or representing the vast number of different things that exist in the ocean working in the same rhythm. The sound builds up before a culmination point where they all end together in harmony, and are punctuated by a synth that sounds different than the other ones that are in it, sort of representing an alarm clock that's waking the dreamer up from his sleep.
Overall, I really enjoyed this project, as I felt like I had more opportunity to create more of a musical piece, as I worked a lot with midi instrumentation.

oceanic drift

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Songs:
The Office Theme Song
On the Wings of Love by Jeffrey Osborne
A Capella by the Jabberwocks

In this project, I basically learned that mixtapes and remixes are a lot harder to do than one might initially think. The pieces I used for this project were the Jabberwock's A Capella, On the Wings of Love by Jeffrey Osbourne, and the Office's theme song, which I was surprised to find in the folder, but excited to use, since its a very upbeat song and I thought it would be fun to use. However, upon actually starting my project, I realized that remixing was essentially a very hard thing to do with produced and finished songs. I found that a lot of the time the song itself had enough mixing and additional sound elements going on within itself that finding things to edit or add either really seemed to detriment the qualities of the song or cause too much confusing noise.
Another major problem I ran into was actually being able to share my project. Because of the really strong melody and mix of On the Wings of Love, I ended up using a lot of things to supplement the mood of the song. I added instrumentation that I made myself, added vocal hums from the A Capella piece, pitch shifted the Office theme to more closely match Wings of Love , and even got some synthesizer effects to add some accentuation. However, once I had finished my piece and actually tried to upload, I was essentially unable to upload it, as the effects I had added were not enough to get by the automatic copyright claim detection system had, and it kept removing the mix. Because of that, I had to go back into the DAW and turn up the effects a lot, making them longer and louder. I also ended up somehow messing some timing up on other things, and overall, in my opinion, really messing up the flow of the mixtape. I was already somewhat unhappy with how it came out, but especially after I think it got a lot worse.
If I had to do this project again, I would probably have picked different songs. The issues with the ones I picked were probably that they had too distinct of melodies and mixes of their own, and without being able to really properly get elements out of them, they were hard to put together. This maybe could have been solved with a little more time in the oven, but a more effective approach, though impractical with time constraints, would have been probably restarting with a new structure for the mix. Overall, I'm personally unhappy with how it came out, but I'll know how to do things better next time.

-Anthony Ragucci

Phone Call

Anthony

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