What good is a Weird Sound Generator if you’re not using it to make weird sounds? Sometimes it is nice to just hold it on your lap and stroke it gently. That aside, it’s quiet useful once you plug it in and start twiddling the knobs. Here’s a piece I created by tuning the each of the four oscillators on the WSG and then fiddled with the filters. At the same time I made some adjustments to a phaser that I was running it through in Ableton Live and topped it off with ping pong delay.
This weekend I completed building a Weird Sound Generator, or WSG, component kit from Music From Outer Space. The kit comes with a printed circuit board and all the electronics, including resistors, capacitors, diodes, ICs, potentiometers, switches, and wires. The rest, like the housing, faceplate, and soldering is up to the builder.
I built a box similar to the recommended specifications and cut the faceplate out of an old computer case. The wood I used was scraps that I held onto and recycled. In fact, I managed built the entire instrument without buying anything beyond the kit itself. Even the stain, nails, glue, screws, and backing board were materials that I had hoarded from previous projects over the years.
It took me about thirteen hours to complete. But, it was a fun thirteen hours of playing with my soldering iron and power tools while following instructions, or coming up with a way to cut through metal, or mount a nine volt battery inside an already cramped case. And, although the case isn’t perfectly square, and the leads are more than a bit tangled, I’m pleased with the little noise maker that I now have at my disposal. In the next entry I’ll illustrate the sequence of events that took place in building this device. Oh yeah… and sounds.
I’ve just rendered my full eighty-six minute Ostraka set from last night’s event at the West Bank Social Center. So, while waiting for the delightful documentation that Andrea Streudel is sure to produce, here’s a short segment of audio from the set.
The projection work of the evening was top notch. An entire wall of the building across from the WBSC was covered with animated silhouettes of attendees on simulated three dimensional “shelves”.
Here’s the excerpt. I’m also including a link to the entire eighty-six minute set that I uploaded to soundcloud.com for all the brave people who’d like to hear the full set.
For the last two weeks I have been working on a performance application that I’m developing in MaxMSP controlled with TouchOSC on the iPhone or iPod Touch. The application is coming along quite well. I have the granular traversal piece working how I want, as I described in Traversing Samples with Granular Synthesis.
Now I’m working on another feature of the application designed to allow the user to play samples with a rotary dial; not unlike manually spinning a record on a turntable. The basics of getting this going were pretty simple, but I also wanted to be able to spin the dial and have it continue to rotate based on the acceleration applied. Secondly, I wanted to have a slider that would adjust the amount of friction, from frictionless to instant braking.
This essentially involved physically modeling the control to behave like a turntable or other spinning device. After trying four or five techniques using standard Max objects I managed to get it working, but it wasn’t pretty. Instead I decided to try using a few lines of Javascript to do the calculations and adjust the position of the dial. This worked much better and only required about 35 lines of code. The best way to illustrate this application will be with video. I’ll shoot a few minutes to get the point across and share it here soon. For now here’s a recording made with the modeled controller I described and just a small amount of friction.
Lately I’ve been experimenting with iPod Touch applications for recording sound. Generally it’s necessary to use a headset to make a recording, but my goal is to figure out a practical way to bypass the headset with an input for a high quality microphone. While unsuccessfully testing my Audio Technica AT822 stereo mic as an input for the iPod Touch I captured an interesting glitch within the application I was testing.
The low frequency waveform (shown in the image at the left) played at regular intervals while I had the microphone attached. Perhaps it’s some sort of communication protocol for headset controls. I removed the DC offset, but otherwise left it as it was. Perhaps I’ll try playing it back at some higher frequencies to see it’s useful for anything musically.
After upgrading my G4 to Safari 4.0.2 today, my M-Audio 2496 PCI bus internal sound card started making this horrible sound anytime audio was played on it. My first instinct was to capture the sound so I plugged a cable into my laptop and grabbed a few seconds of it in Audacity. Listen at your own risk. It’s loud and unpleasant, but somehow fun and delightful (reminding me of someone I once dated in the past). Fortunately after reinstalling the drivers it started behaving properly again (unfortunately this technique doesn’t work on partners).
I came across this set while browsing through my Ableton Live documents. Glitches and clicks slowly melt into metallic tones, back to glitches, and finally auto filtered before fading out. I could not find this experiment from last October posted on ACB, so it must have fallen through the cracks.
Here’s another glitch created with the GMS running at an unreasonably high tempo. This time it sounds a bit like the racket that comes from an acoustic modem as it makes a connection. Remember those things that people used to use to log on to the internets?
I’ve already posted a few glitchy sounds created by the GMS in it’s various states of development. Most of them created by some bug, which I love. Serendipity never looses its charm for me. This sound is more deliberate and illustrates how sixty fourth notes sound played on a basic piano sample from twenty beats per minute all the up to nine-hundred and ninety-nine BPM. I’m not sure how accurately the GMS is reproducing these durations at tempos greater than five-hundred beats per minutes, but it sounds pretty wicked anyway.
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I’ve just rendered my full eighty-six minute 
For the last two weeks I have been working on a performance application that I’m developing in 
Lately I’ve been experimenting with iPod Touch applications for recording sound. Generally it’s necessary to use a headset to make a recording, but my goal is to figure out a practical way to bypass the headset with an input for a high quality microphone. While unsuccessfully testing my Audio Technica AT822 stereo mic as an input for the iPod Touch I captured an interesting glitch within the application I was testing. 
After upgrading my G4 to Safari 4.0.2 today, my M-Audio 2496 PCI bus internal sound card started making this horrible sound anytime audio was played on it. My first instinct was to capture the sound so I plugged a cable into my laptop and grabbed a few seconds of it in Audacity. Listen at your own risk. It’s loud and unpleasant, but somehow fun and delightful (reminding me of someone I once dated in the past). Fortunately after reinstalling the drivers it started behaving properly again (unfortunately this technique doesn’t work on partners). 
I came across this set while browsing through my Ableton Live documents. Glitches and clicks slowly melt into metallic tones, back to glitches, and finally auto filtered before fading out. I could not find this experiment from last October posted on ACB, so it must have fallen through the cracks. 
Here’s another glitch created with the 
I’ve already posted a few glitchy sounds created by the 