broken axe is a composition in cSound. One day during my travels I came across an axe lying on the ground with its handle broken into two pieces. It was such a tragic end to such a beautiful axe that I shed a single tear and wrote this song in its memory.
The song starts with a droning generated by the foscil opcode - this symbolizes the axe in its early days when it was happily sitting in the store window with no cares in the world. This carefree lifestyle didn't last long though. A mean old codger named Eugene bought the axe one day and immediately started to abuse it. Cutting very hard woods like ironwood dulled the axe's edge and its vitality for life. This is symbolized by the sharp fluctuations in the foscil instrument. But all was not bad for the axe. Eugene's son Rasputin often chopped very fine and soft woods like pine for the family's fireplace. The special grain instrument in the composition symbolizes the chips and grains of wood that the axe would happily hack away from the pine. The axe was used and abused in this fashion for three years until the day it met its tragic end.
One day Rasputin ran out of pine to cut for the family fire, so he cut down a nearby maple tree. Unknown to Rasputin, his father despised the smell of maple smoke. When Rasputin set the nightly fire, Eugene went on a maple-smoke induced rampage. He grabbed the axe, and went to the nearest ironwood tree and started chopping away in a fit of rage. But the axe had enough. The axe concentrated all of its force and when Eugene made his next swing at the tree, the axe broke its handle in two, causing the axe's head to bounce back and lodge itself in Eugene's skull. The axe never had to chop another tree again. Eugene's rampage is symbolized by the swifly changing frequencies of the grain instrument and the final climatic moment is represented by the sweeping oscil sine wave at the end of the song.
Most of the instruments used are composed of single cSound opcodes that use parameters that are modified througout
the score file.
The foscil instrument is used as the background hum present throughout the entire song, and also at the
beginning as a series of higher-pitched buzzing noises.
The oscil instrument is used at the end of the song with an expon function as input for its frequency
to produce the sweeping sine wave effect.
The loscil instrument is used with the axe2.aiff sample and is played in the last part of the song with
different frequencies and amplituds for 1 second intervals.
Finally, a number of opcodes were combined to create the special grain instrument used near the beginning of the song.
The buzz opcode is used with a sine wave, and combined with one channel from a loscil using the axe2.aif
sample. The oscil is used with a sine wave and combined with the other channel of the loscil. The
results of these two combinations are subtracted and divided in two to provide the frequency input for the
grain opcode. A data flow diagram of the instrument is below.
The final composition can be downloaded here: broken.mp3
The orc and sco files for cSound can be downloaded here: broken_axe.orc, broken_axe.sco
The sample axe2.aif is borrowed from Pink Floyd's "Careful With That Axe, Eugene". Please don't sue me, Pink.