Betty and I were interested in early 2000’s, nostalgic R&B music.

This was a song that Betty likes; it has the 2000’s style despite being released in 2025. It reminded me of other artists I would listen to, such as Imogen Heap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I3tWqiDlZU

The beginning of “After” by Baroque sounded similar to how “Car Alarm — Reprise” begins. Both Betty and I loved the mechanical — almost digital — sound of the car alarm sample that became the underlying beat for the remainder of the song.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4YGEnZVit0

Although it doesn’t sound quite as beautiful, we were interested in testing how a repeating sound could become music. I wish we were able to do more with the syncopation.

Code:

Nostalgic Jaunt — https://editor.p5js.org/mossrice/sketches/6ITEMsUDo

The original “car” noises were made using oscillator — we wanted a bit of a harsher sound, so we used “square”for the type. We then recorded the oscillator note and converted it to mp3 to play as a sound.

For the layer that sounds like a siren, it consists of three notes. After recording several square-wave oscillator tones by pressing two keys together (creating a chord-like sound), we picked three that sounded distinct from one another and used their MP3 files to create the drum pattern by adjusting the modulus and remainder.

While looking into the p5.js sound reference, we found PolySynth. We were having trouble playing oscillator as a repeating note and didn’t want to keep creating MP3 files and using load sound. PolySynth solved these problems!

For the scale ratios, we edited the Arabic/Indian scale to be lower, as we were going for a more melancholic feeling — the higher notes on the scale made the melody sound too cheerful.