"I never worked a day in my life;
I just laid back and let the big beat lead me."
- The Jungle Brothers
A good techno DJ spins a continuous stream of music by seamlessly mixing one song into the next. This involves not only synchronizing the beats of the songs to be mixed, but also incrementally adjusting the pitches of the songs so that during the transition, neither song sounds unnatural. Your goal in this project is to use signal processing to produce a computerized DJ that can automatically produce a non-stop mix of music given a library of non-synchronized tracks as input. On top of this basic specification, additional points will be given for implementing advanced techniques like sampling, beat juggling and airbeats that make the mix more exciting. At the end of the term, the computer DJs will face off in a Battle for World Supremacy with a library of entirely novel songs.
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For students, complete course materials, the discussion board, and grading tools can be found on this course's WebCT page. For visitors, here are the syllabus and Big Beat DJ project description.
The votes are in and the best DJs have been selected! Here are some of the winning submissions:
Required Mix: Each group had to mix 30-60 clips of 5 specified techno songs.
DJ Dizcrete (Scott Hildebrandt, Hironori
Sasaki, and Jeffrey Wilczewski)
DJ Pirate (James Cooney, Reuben James, and
Pavan Pulijaal)
12" of Vinyl (Mario Angelides, Dhanraj
Gobin, and Daniel Heiman)
Optional Mix: Each group had to mix at least 5 songs of their choosing.
1st place: 12" of Vinyl (Mario Angelides,
Dhanraj Gobin, and Daniel Heiman)
2nd place: DJ Dizcrete (Scott Hildebrandt,
Hironori Sasaki, and Jeffrey Wilczewski)
Honorable mention: Turnip the Beets (Jonathan
Bright, David Danko, and Christon Riendeau)
Special effects:
Flange by DJBOT (Christine Connelly, Kevin Eng,
and Betty Tzu-Hsin Tsao)
Slapback echo by DJ Pirate (James Cooney, Reuben
James, and Pavan Pulijaal)
Sample overlay by The System is Down (TauCeti
Deichmann, Clark Schirmer, Mark Matarazzo, and Matthew Zuckerman)