Day 18: Patch Exploration

Another thing I’m a sucker for? Tremolo. Especially tremolo with a variable or progressive rate. Soundtoys Tremolator includes a very handy envelope function for controlling both depth and rate, which you can hear in this collection of sounds. It’s an easy way to add dynamism and arc to otherwise static patches.

Day 17: Patch Exploration

I’m a sucker for cheap tape machine sounds. Give me wow and flutter any day of the week. I’m not sure what the practical applications would be for UI sound design in a professional context; perhaps a brand that wants to highlight its vintage street cred, or a game with a 60s/70s flavor? Luckily in this project I don’t have to confine myself to brand style guides!

Day 16: Patch Exploration

With these musical gestures I’m not trying to create a functional system per se; rather I’m just looking at different variations on simple chords and melodies. The real work is in finding sounds that are inspiring to play, that feel compelling enough that you can play one chord or one note and have it feel intentional and compelling.

Day 15: Patch Exploration

Moving on to experimenting with musical gestures and dialing in patches and effects. My background as a composer/performer/producer helps a lot here but designing patches for shorter UI gestures is very different than producing songs.

For the next several days I’m going to focus on designing synth patches and then exploring different ways to edit or manipulate them into discrete gestures.

Day 14: Shapes and Gestures

Today’s prompt: “Unfold”

Day 13: Shapes and Gestures

Today’s prompt: “Ping”

Day 12: Shapes and Gestures

Today’s shape is “Out and Back.” I think I’m just starting to scratch the surface of this shape, so I may do more later this week.

I’m also hitting an interesting moment in this project. I’m running out of ideas. But that’s a good thing. It’s when the hard work begins and the good stuff starts happening. It’s one of the reasons I was excited to do this for 100 days - I knew I would hit a wall after 2 or 3 weeks and I would need to get outside my comfort zone. Get ready for messy work!

Day 11: Shapes and Gestures

We’re back after a week away from the internet! This week we’re going to play around with shapes and gestures. How many different ways can we make a sound that goes up, down, back and forth, towards, away, etc…? Can we make them organically? Can we make them through synthesis?

These kinds of gestural ideas can sound meaningless in isolation, but when you are creating a system or a language for a device to communicate with a human the difference between, say, Up or Down can be very meaningful. It could indicate Send vs. Receive, Approve vs. Reject, Happy vs. Angry, Error vs. Resolve…it all happens in shapes and gestures.

Day 10: Structure Exploration

Today I set out to make short but texturally interesting sounds. Obviously you can go much shorter than these, and should go much shorter than these when you are doing something purely functional or something that will repeat frequently. But how much sonic interest can you fit into something that’s a quarter of a second long?

Day 9: Structure Exploration

For today I set out trying to create sounds that built up, like a riser or power-up. But in the process I stumbled into some cool effects with stutter edits. I decided to explore what I could do with that technique. Is this a structure exploration? Probably not, but sometimes you just have to follow an idea to its conclusion.