This was the first artefact that we started the unit with, which was an animated light bulb where we were to create our own synths or sounds in our chosen DAW. I chose to use Ableton because I find it is good when creating synths from scratch since it is easy to do with “Analog” that I have used previously. The first thing I thought of after watching the video was creating some kind of sound that would match the movement of the moving arrows, where I first used Analog to try to create some kind of “electronic” noise. While experimenting with the different under Instruments in Ableton, I ended up creating this sound with “Wavetable”. From there, I decided just to try others and just play anything on the MIDI since there wasn’t much going on in this given video. I played with the pitch strip that I have on my own MIDI keyboard, holding on the same key(s) throughout the video, which creates that movement, though not doing much. To create the more ‘electronic’ sound that I wanted, I used less sine waves, and more square and sawtooth waves, since sine waves are smoother, but I was looking for more of the rough, ‘twang’ that square and sawtooth waves have. When I created these ‘electric’ sounds with the arrow sound, I felt like something was missing, and thought about how a circle is created in the video, so took this observation, creating a sound that made it sound as if the circle were like an update being completed, so I went with an ascending note pattern to achieve this. The whole process involved a lot of experimenting with the different settings of each Instrument so that I could have a different variety of sounds that could be layered on top of one another.
