Guest Post: Nicholas Starke – The Same Color As Your Skin (Audiolet Remix) and Sound Check (Audiolet Remix)
My name is Nicholas Starke. I did two remixes for Schemawound’s remix album “Body Movements”. Before I began working on these two remixes, I decided that I would not remix the sound of Schemawound’s tracks, but instead I would remix the ideas. For a couple of weeks, in the evenings I would pour over Schemawound’s source, analyzing his Supercollider code. After a while I developed a deep understanding and indeed an appreciation for how all the tracks were constructed. In the end, I chose two tracks to remix; The Same Color as Your Skin and Sound Check. The next question in my mind was now that I had chosen which tracks to remix, how was I going to remix the “idea” and not the sound.
In all the remixes I have done in the past, the idea has been this: take the original sound, manipulate it, add things to it, filter out things from it, etc, etc. In choosing to remix the idea behind the tracks I abandoned this methodology. In its place, I decided to work with the source itself to produce pieces that maintained the essence of the original material, while at the same time bringing new life to them.
At first I sat down with the Supercollider source and began manipulating it to produce different sounds. I wasn’t pleased with the results of this approach, as the work I was coming up with seemed somehow too derivative of the original; either that or too similar. So i took a step back and thought to myself, what would make this project truly unique?
For my day job, I am a software developer; specifically, a web developer. I love developing software, both for music and for the web. I finally decided that for this remix I would bridge the two: I would create a browser based remix for the two tracks. So, of course, I set out to create remixes in JavaScript.
My first step was to translate Schemawound’s source into JavaScript. This in and of itself was a huge task, as while SuperCollider and JavaScript have some structural similarities, the purpose of the two could not be more different: SuperCollider is for generating sound; JavaScript is for manipulating web pages.
Instead of trying to write oscillator functions myself, and then building out all the other boilerplate code associated with generating sound in a browser, I spent some time on GitHub looking at various JavaScript libraries that take care of those needs for me. My search came up with two different libraries: DSP.js and Audiolet.js. In the end, I chose Audiolet.js – mainly because it’s creator designed the pattern system in it based off of the pattern system in SuperCollider.
Using Audiolet.js I recreated as best as the language would allow me Schemawound’s two tracks, based off the source he so generously provided. That process took several days. Both of those tracks’ movement is based on an envelop sliding between different values, and the sound is determined by Sine Wav oscillators modulating themselves like crazy. In comparison, the versions I had that were based strictly off of the original source sounded similar – but not exactly the same. I guessed at that point that the difference was in the way that JavaScript rendered the Math.sin function – it must have been different at some low level than the way SuperCollider renders the SinOsc.ar function. In any case, I didn’t spend much time worrying about it, because I didn’t want them to sound exactly the same in the end anyway.
At this point I felt like I was able to manipulate the ideas behind the tracks. I started playing with values: I changed the values of how long the movement envelope took to get to various positions; I changed the value of the positions themselves. In the end, I decided that the source oscillator wasn’t producing interesting timbres; I switched that oscillator from a sine wave to a saw wave, and likewise played around with some of the modulator oscillators. After a while I settles on a certain configuration, and called it a day. I set up some minor UI code to start and stop the sound, and then recorded the audio output from Chrome using AudioHijack. Boom. Both remixes were done this way.
I’d like to thank Jonathan for giving me the opportunity not only to remix his work, but to post as a guest on his blog. The entire process of this remix has been a blast, and I look forward to doing more remix work for Jonathan in the future. I’d also like to thank all the other remixers; the entire remix album came together really well and all of the submissions are fantastic.
If you are interested in seeing the remixes I created in action, I have set them up on a (really crappy looking) website: http://www.nickstarke.com
Likewise, if you are interested in hearing more of my music, my album “Foundation” is available as a name your price download from Xylem Records.
February 3, 2013 – Atlantic, Iowa.