You can also view this on YouTube: https://scratch.mit.edu/discuss/youtube/xmeQ_AtPF-A/ This project is for my journalism class. I wrote a column about why the school mascot should be changed from bulldogs to calabi-yau manifolds. This video will explain to the reader what a calabi-yau manifold is... kind of. For the song, I was feeling inspired by Pumpkin Song by Jack Stauber and The Whole World and You by Tally Hall, so I decided to go with a similar early Warner Brothers cartoon sound. I tried making the song multiple times and couldn't get a song that quite fit what I had in mind. Fortunately, while I was messing with JummBox, and online midi editor, I ended up making something that sounded alright. I didn't have a lot of time to make this project, so I just imported the MIDI file into a different DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) and swapped the sound out for Mellotron samples to get a more realistic and dated sound. I would have liked to actually record it with my keyboard so that the timing was a bit loser to fit the era a bit better, but I needed to get this done really quickly. For the whistling, I recorded myself whistling one note and mapped it to the midi track via a sampler. Then I transposed the midi to be an octave or two higher than the original whistle so that it would have a somewhat odd and unsettling sound. I decided that it would sound a bit nicer with some more whistling, so I then attempted to actually whistle along with the melody. I am horrible at whistling and it sounded awful, but it did make the song sound a bit... "derpy-er", so I kept it. To transition from the first part of the song to the second part of the song, I went back to Jummbox and used the white noise drum option, and set the chord type to arpeggiated. Then I had the drum hit swell in volume first while the pitch slid down. Then, after that bar, I just had the same thing, but in reverse. However, I added another track of the same drum sound for the actual hit, to make it a bit more impactful, but turned off the chord arpeggiator. During that transition, I automated the tape emulation plugin to slowly transition to just the dry signal, switching from mono to stereo in the process. I'm not sure I explained that very well. Finally, for the second half of the song, I played a slightly reharmonized version of the original chord progression on guitar. (F=Fmaj7, G=G6, and C=C6) I also added the Dsus2 chord at the end for a good resolution chord. Another thing I did to tie the two pieces together was adding a section of the original melody to the end of the song, just changing the last note to make it a bit more ominous and cinematic. I put that particular melody through a granulator plugin that I've been having a lot of fun with recently. I think the resulting sound is kind of cool. It reminds me of the guitar sound in Catcher in the Rye by the Dandy Warhols. I don't think that's how they actually got the sound, though. I suspect that they played the guitar part through a tremolo pedal and reversed it.
