Producer & Designer
Coding Against the Wall of Silence
Electronic score for Charlie Chaplin's romantic short "The Immigrant" with Max/MSP
Coding Against the Wall of Silence is my subtle political statement towards the political situation in the United States and as well as the world back in 2017, and it is even still relevant, maybe even more so nowadays.
Under the tutelage of Prof. Chris Arrell and with the grant provided by the Weiss Summer Research Program in the Humanities, Social Sciences & Fine Arts program, I composed this 24 minute film score by using Max/MSP and Audacity. In this piece, for some themes, I exploited electronic generative music by creating algorithms that draw notes from jazz and modal scales through a random number generator and a metronome. Other themes seek to portray a less thematically centered sound, so I created random number generators that determine how much weight different kinds of waves should have in my sound synthesis. To make things more interesting, I created a beat that corresponds with the main character theme and used random number generators to control the timbre and the frequency of the beat generated. Through careful selection of thematic elements, chance operation, sound synthesis and control of rhythm, I created my own electronic orchestra. I then recorded samples generated by those electronic instruments and arranged them according to the plot breakdown that I created in the beginning of the project.
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Below is a video of the full composition, as well as the three minute excerpt.
Design & Implementation Process
Max/MSP Patch: Tramp's theme
This patch shows how I made the Tramp's theme. Because he is a fairly lively and fun character, I thought I would make a fairly jazzy/relaxing theme for him. Therefore, I wrote the patch for it to choose notes from the jazz scale that fits into a "doot-doot, doot-doot" pattern.
Max/MSP patch: Seasick Theme
This patch shows how I made the seasick theme. I wanted to do a vibrato of some sort that resembles the movement of the sea, and I also chose the octatonic scale for note generation. In the end, the patch allows me to fine tune how much vibrato as well as the panning, which allows me to further that seasick feeling.
Max/MSP: Themes conglomeration
In this patch, you could see all the themes that I used in the composition. In ticking the crosses in this patch, I could turn on and off the themes easily. There are six main themes and more of their variations, as well as a human sequence patch that maps the keyboard input to correlated frequencies.
Audacity: Final Arrangement of Themes
Finally, after breaking each scene in the film down, I plot the themes accordingly into the corresponding time slot in Audacity in order to make it match up to the film.