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http://art102.com/Irene/Final/

For my final project, I really wanted to focus on music because I have a musical background. I used to play piano, violin, and guitar. What has always intrigued me, was the composition of music. Since I played a few different instruments as well, whenever I listen to songs, I always think about what kind of elements and instruments are used to compose that song. I try to think about how the artist or composer picks parts that make music that sounds good, and how layering sounds affects what we hear and how we respond to songs.

So for my project, I took inspiration from a “launchpad”, and the idea of having a DJ board online. I picked a song, “La Ritournelle”, that I love, and I worked with that for my online launchpad. The majority of work put into my project is more “behind the scenes” as users are basically presented with the final work.There are 11 different sound buttons, five of which that hold more of a tune and six of which are more percussion sounds. There is also one mute button at the very top. I coded every one of the sound button by listening to the original song and then, using a keyboard, figuring out what the notes are and translating them onto a computer.

This process in itself was extremely interesting for me. It was going from one musical language that I’ve been familiar with almost my entire life, into a coded language that I just learned over the last two months. The sound is a lot more generated than the original, creating a very different effect. Users can turn on and off any combination of the buttons on the launchpad to create different versions of the song.