Haoren and I paired up to make a piece together for sound week, and I like what we ended up creating! We both had a similar reaction to the assignment in that we wanted to attempt to replicate nature. I was interested in bird calls, and Haoren wanted to replicate running water. I can't speak too much about Haoren's process, but I know that he was exploring noise and he also merged our code together.
Initially, I was pretty intimidated approaching coding sound, mainly due to the math involved with making rhythms or producing harmonies. There have been many points in my life where I've tried to make music and my brain just doesn't work that way. What I am confident in is making strange noises, and I have a lot of experience with modular synthesizers. Oscillators, delay, attack, decay, envelopes, reverb, and pitch-shifting are all things I've encountered outside of p5, and you can even approach the setup in p5 similar to designing a signal path on a synthesizer. Once I recognized the similarities, I was fully into it.
The actual code is mostly setting random ranges for the oscillator's frequency, how long notes can be, how far down the pitch will shift, and when. There's also a function I defined where it mutes the bird-noise from the master amp in the signal path, and turns it back on. This was my attempt at creating punctuation with my bird calls.
While I can't say our result is natural or precise, I think Haoren and I made a really interesting, ever-evolving soundscape. It produces the image of a chilly nighttime forest lit by the moon, with a creature calling off in the distance.