Alarm

clean-up #19:

There was a sleeping-bag concert as part of the Sound of Stockholm festival this year. Music for sleeping - what a great concept!

First I was assigned to play last and would thereby have had the honour/responsibility of waking everybody up for breakfast at 7:00 in the morning. Both fun and daunting. How to let your audience sleep in as long as possible and then wake them up gently but firmly?

I assumed most people would be asleep when it was my turn and that I also would be very tired. So I prepared my solo set (using redThermoKontroll) to be extremely simple and static in nature. Hardly any variation - only a couple of sounds sources (4 SuperCollider patches I think it was) with looong transitions between settings that I could control manually.

Then there was the waking up part and for that, I wrote the very simple sounding code below. It starts slowly with one little alarm going off. Then a second alarm, then more and more until complete chaos. I made it so that this patch could be mixed in with my drones and with separate control over volume.

Unfortunately, when I got to Stockholm they had changed the playing order and I did do my performance around midnight instead. And I never set the alarms off.

//--set alarms
(
~num= 25;  //number of alarms
~fadeTime= 10;  //fade in time in seconds
~num.do{|i|
  Ndef(("alarm"++i).asSymbol, {|amp= 0, lag= 5|
    var src= Pulse.ar(
      ExpRand(300, 3000)+LFPulse.kr(ExpRand(3, 30), 0, Rand(0.4, 0.6), Rand(-100, 100)),
      Rand(0.4, 0.6),
      LFPulse.kr(LinRand(0.05, 2), 0, LinRand(0.1, 0.5), 0.5)
    );
    Pan2.ar(src, Rand(-0.95, 0.95), amp.lag(lag));
  });
};
Ndef.all;  //list them
)
//--start alarms
(
~task.stop;
~task= Task({
  ~num.do{|i|
    Ndef(("alarm"++i).asSymbol).play(fadeTime: ~fadeTime).set(\amp, 7/~num).postln;
    i.linlin(0, ~num-1, ~fadeTime*2, ~fadeTime/2).wait;
  };
}).play;
)
//--stop alarms
(
~task.stop;
~task= Task({
  ~num.do{|i|
    Ndef(("alarm"++i).asSymbol).stop(fadeTime: 1/~fadeTime);
    i.linlin(0, ~num-1, 1/~fadeTime, 10/~fadeTime).wait;
  };
}).play;
)