Spirits In the Room

— A SoundWalk project

Spirits In the Room is a soundwalk piece produced using recorded foley sounds which are processed using spectral audio effects. For countless late nights in my apartment on Huntington Ave in Boston, I was all alone but surrounded by the random sounds in my room — sounds of opening a door, sounds of pouring water into a glass, sounds in the closet, etc. The thought then comes into my mind : what if these sounds are spirits live with me in this silence? The piece is aimed to capture and transfer these sounds that people usually ignore in daily lives into music, as if bringing them to life. The sounds are processed using effects including spectral delay, spectral freeze, spectral gating, cross-synthesis, and other audio effects in Cecilia 5, Puremagnetik, Csound, and other plug-ins.

— A Csound sample challenge project

Catalog C is a piece created for 2023 Spring Csound Catalog contest creating in 6 hours. All the sounds are processed using samples from the Csound Catalog. The piece aims to break the boundary between computer generated music samples and modern EDM music. All the instruments are purely generated by Csound, and are manipulated using restricted tools in Ableton including pitch shifter, sampler, and lfo. By using limited tools in the process of creation, the piece discovers creative ways of utilizing samples to do sound designs. While the samples are twisted and transferred into modern EDM genres like glitch, a lot of signatures and flavors of computer generated sounds are preserved.

— A DSPoem project

Inspired by the poem Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost, this piece is an electro acoustic composition aiming to find a way of enhancing the expression of poem by incorporating electronic music with nature sounds. The beauty of nature intrigues people, but that beauty never last for long. As a electronic music producer, I’ve always trying to unfold the magic inside sounds in nature by using DSP tools to manipulate them. Through processing sounds of creek, feet stepping on leaves, bird sounds in the forest and etc, the power of voice is extended by the images provided by the sounds. The piano improvises along the reading of the poem, which progressively sets off the mood with the words. By adding generative sounds by modular synthesizer,  a picture full of life is depicted. By using spectral resonator, phase vocoder, and other spectral audio effects, the quickly passed beauty in the poem is transferred into a piece that could be experienced as another medium.

AIsong

— A electronic piece made with AI tools

AIsong is an electronic piece made using machine learning tools. The song is inspired by g Enter Demons & Gods by Yaboi Hanoi, which appears in the 2022 AI Song Context finalist. The song discover the use of AI tools like DDSP timbre transfer, RAVE (Realtime Audio Variational encoder), and Magenta Studio in the process of EDM track production. By integrating AI tools in the creation of music, the benefits and flaws bring by today’s music AI tools are realized : while AI tools could generate vast music ideas in a short period of time , a lot of production work is still needed by human producer including music development, melody writing, and sound tweaking. As AI tools becomes more and more strong, it is worthy to rethink the relationship between musician and AI.

5.4thbwYou

— A Soundbyte project

This is a Soundbyte project created only using the recording of me reading the sentence “May the force be with you”. The project aims to discover the possibilities of transferring voice into instruments, as well as to use music as a medium to preserve cultural symbols. As a fan of the Star Wars movie, I choose the famous line in the movie as the only sound source for the project. The sentence is processed using sampler, re-envelop, and spectral audio effects to be turned into drums, pad, arpeggiators, bass, as well as other instruments. Through doing the project, I learn the use of extracting frequency component using spectral audio tools, and I also discover different effects bring by changing FFT window size, window overlap size, window type, and other spectral related factors using DSP tools like Cecilia 5, Audacity, and Puremagnetik. By turning the sentence into a full track, this project shows creativity on using voice for sound design, but also preserve the cultural symbol relies in the Star Wars movie series.