Assignments

The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.

Sol LeWitt

weekly meditations

Most weeks you’ll create a one-file “meditation”: a quick remix of our in-class demos plus a short written reflection. These are exploratory sketches, not polished projects, meant to deepen your grasp of the week’s concepts through making. No fixed endpoint required; just push the idea somewhere new from where we started.

If you're feeling stuck, here some personas you might consider adopting for a meditation:

• The Experimentalist: Devise a "hypothesis" and write code which puts it to the test. Pick a specific claim about something we covered ("A touchpad is the perfect interface to phase between harmonics"), run a small experiment, and evaluate the result. Tell us what worked, what failed, and what you'd try next.
• The Curious Explorer: Mess around, remix the code, what do you notice? If you're unsure where to go, poke around with an open mind, remix class examples, swap parameters, break things on purpose. Report back on your journey: what sort of discoveries did you stumble into, and how did you push at least one of them further?
• The Technical Virtuoso: Master the medium by shaping the code. Set yourself a technical or organizational challenge ("In class we couldn't run more than X oscillators before the browser glitched, I'm going to rewrite it more efficiently so that becomes possible"). Show how you structured the sketch, why you chose that structure, and what trade-offs you made. (CS folks: bring in patterns you know: state management, functional composition, etc.)
• The Free Thinker: Bring your own process. If you already have a well-defined practice, let the brief bend to you. Apply this week’s concept to your own workflow, make something that feels true to your practice, and explain what you did, why you did it, and how the class material changed the result.

musical genealogies

This assignment has two goals: first, to trace how musical ideas evolve, treating style as a lineage of influences rather than the product of a single "genius", and second, to practice decomposing songs into systems, made up of identifiable components you could recreate and recombine in code. Each week you'll extend a single, living document that follows a chain of documented influences focused specifically on musicality (rhythm, timbre, harmony, form, production, etc), as opposed to other creative elements (like lyrics or branding).

In Week 1, you'll pick an artist you like and identify one documented musical influence. This should be named by the artist or cited by a credible critic/scholar, not an influence you suspect or assume. Each subsequent week, move one step back from your current endpoint to one of their documented influences, and so on. For every node add:

• Name the artist and their influence.
• Brief analysis (3-5 sentences) identifying the specific aspect of the music they were influenced by (groove/tempo, meter, harmonic language, timbral palette, instrumentation, production techniques, form/arrangement, etc)
• List specific tracks (from both artists) where this stylistic component can be heard (with timecodes for each), if possible include links to the tracks hosted on an online platform.

Keep everything in a single evolving Google Doc which you share with me (nbriz@uchicago.edu) and submit on canvas.

final project

The final project will be a polished, hand crafted/coded interactive and/or generative musical system published on the web. If it’s an interactive system, like a digital instrument, it should allow users to interact with it and generate sounds in a meaningful way. This should not be a web-based version of an existing instrument (like a guitar or piano) but rather something more experimental which embraces the creative possibilities of the Web. If you create a generative (non-interactive) musical composition, it should not be coded version of a pre-existing song or melody and ideally not something that could be easily written as a classical score, rather it should be a composition that leverages the generative potential of the Web.

Submit a publicly accessible URL on canvas and be prepared to present it in a class for critique. You’ll be expected to demo/perform and briefly explain your concept, approach, and key challenges. See the final project page for a review on how to publish content online and additional considerations.