Izarra: Audacity, Music and Pure Data

I only was invited to join the blog recently, so this is my first post.

First off, here is the link to my Audacity tracks on SoundCloud:

http://soundcloud.com/gaby-izarra

Not only did I use sounds from Freesound, but also ones I created myself. It was a fun assignment, and I think I want to start producing my own music. Manually looping stuff is pretty difficult though. I think I just need to learn more about Audacity.

As for some of the bands we were talking about last week, I listened to some songs by The Ramones, Sex Pistols, and The Pixies. I feel young and ignorant for not knowing more about these bands. I’m just glad to know that there’s so much great music in this world that I have yet to discover. Like someone who posted before me, I also took the History of Rock class a few years back so I got a feel for the development of rock’n’roll. It’s so funny to think how it all branched out into everything I listen to today.

I listened to some stuff by Martin Denny, the “father of exotica.” I love the foreign sounds, and I think I would enjoy using sounds from different places to make music, although I think I’d prefer sounds from the orient

Learning about the cut-up technique also answered a lot of questions about Radiohead’s album Kid A. I never understood why nothing made sense!

It was really interesting to make cool sounds in Pure Data. I especially liked the Sampler Scratch, the Sampler Overlap the Scratch disk and the Nonlinear distortion and Difference Tones. I love Dubstep and House music so it’s cool to be able to create some of the sounds that I hear in my daily music. It still looks like a very complex software so I'm looking forward to learning a little more about the program.

Anyway, I’m very interested in learning more about music composition and song form. I kind-of-sort-of want to be a DJ. =) And I'm sorry I didn't make it to the Digital Convergence performance the other night. I wasn't sure if it was okay to show up half way through. I'll definitely be at the next one though!