For this project, I did a lot of research. I had about 7-8 years of memes to catch up on. It was brutal… I dove too deep and frequently ended up on the dark side of the Internet… I saw things that can’t be unseen, learned things that I wished could be un-learnt.

On my journey I encounter the song Renai Circulation, a popular Japanese song from a critically-acclaimed anime series, performed by Kana Hanazawa (she has a very unique voice btw).

But besides from the mellifluous voice of Ms. Hanazawa and the catchy rhythm, Renai Circulation is also notorious for its beats: It goes with anything! So after scavenging the internet for a few other meme songs, I decided to put them all together on Renai Circulation’s beats. The idea is simple: The beats will play on the background, and lyrics of other songs will be played on top, all will combine to create a remix. The controller detection function (“hi”) on MAX7 isn’t that well built and I figured out that I have to plug in the controller before initiating the maxpatcher. It may sound simple but it took me a good while to find out. The playback function is basic, there is no visual for this project because I don’t want the chaos of all the memes mashed together on the screen, furthermore the memes themselves are the songs.

The tempo of all the songs are different, so I used REAPER for a bit of editing, mostly matching and unifying the tempo of songs, occasionally trimming away unwanted parts.

Live performing with this “device” is hard since it is hard to match the beat perfectly everytime you press a button to initiate a section of a song. Therefore I put together a final piece ahead of time, just in case I’d (most likely) fail in class. Enjoy!

Thai Dao – 11/18/2018