Last class of Spring Semester 2010

This was the last week of the Spring Semester here at Cal State San Marcos. Yay! Tuesday night was the last class for Public Speaking but I still had Dance and Electronic Music today.

The semester isn't *quite* over yet, though, as I still have a concert on Monday night for Vocal Ensemble (it's the solo concert - I get to play bells!) and I have to turn in my take-home final for Dance class on Tuesday morning.

Today, I submitted my Final Project for Electronic Music. All semester, we've had lab assignments to do. The prof would lecture on the material for about an hour, then we'd have another hour to do the lab work. He designed it so that each lab built on the previous one and by the end of the semester we would accumulate a final project. We mostly used Reason software for sequencing & synthesis, working with wavetables and other samples. Toward the end of the semester, we started working in ProTools and recorded stuff to create our own electronic instrument, then combined our Reason and ProTools sessions for the final project. I really enjoyed the class & plan to take the next one in the series, too, probably next Spring.

Oh, of course I brought in a handbell (my G#4, which hardly ever gets used!) to record and transform into an electronic instrument. Honestly, by the time I was done with it, you can't tell that it's a handbell at all!

Our final project isn't being graded on the aesthetic qualities of it -- it's just an Intro class, after all -- but rather on if we actually included all the requirements of the lab assignments. This was kind of frustrating, actually, as I'd work to get it sounding the way I wanted to, then the next lab would have us add or change something and all of a sudden it wasn't so good any more! Grr! After a couple iterations of this, I decided that I would take it as a challenge to make something that I liked that still fulfilled all the requirements. (I also did some geeky things like building the piece around the whole tone scale and using Pi to determine the placement of some elements....)

My piece is not some grand masterpiece of electronic music, but I think given all the stuff we were required to do and the fact that it was my first time ever working with electronica, I think it's pretty good.

What do you think?

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