Basic Bouncing Ball

Intro to Computer Music final project

Made by David Lu

This computer music piece is based off of "Bucephalus Bouncing Ball" by Aphex Twin. The bouncing ball effect in this work is used in a variety of ways.

Created: July 16th, 2015

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Motivation

In Aphex Twin's Come to Daddy EP, there is a track called Bucephalus Bouncing Ball. Around the middle, there is a part where it sounds like the artist actually sampled or synthesized a bouncing ball (I later found out he just sequenced it), and made a beat out of it with a lot of clever effects and transformations. I wanted to continue exploring the ideas in this track. My piece is basically a remix of Bucephalus Bouncing Ball, sampling the ball itself, but I physically modeled a bouncing ball and went further in depth in the theme of the bouncing ball.

In the end, Aphex Twin's track is a lot groovier because I'm pretty certain he sequenced it by hand (with a tracker), whereas I'd have to jump through even more hoops to program the algorithms to be groovy.

Techniques

I used the bouncing ball effect in as many ways as possible: as a sound effect, as a rhythmic element, as a structural device, and as a way to recursively change tempo and meters through cross rhythms. In the last section, it is used to modulate meter and tempo while causing an overall acceleration. This is possible because of the bouncing ball effect's property of time-scale invariance: No matter how much the pattern is stretched or compressed, it will retain the same shape in time.

Other Nyquist techniques include: A gratuitous amount of score generation and manipulation, sampling, granular synthesis, comb filter/feedback delay, reverb, stereo delay, pattern generation, amplitude modulation, fm synthesis, reversing

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This computer music piece is based off of "Bucephalus Bouncing Ball" by Aphex Twin. The bouncing ball effect in this work is used in a variety of ways.