In my third example of using Granulator I started by manipulating some of the Granulator parameters manually during the recording. I followed this up by improvising on the keyboard to create an abstract landscape of metallic tones. It might sound like it, but no processing was applied before or after the Granulator instrument, or to the snow globe recording.
For my second experiment with Granulator I used the same Three Wind-Up Snow Globes recording, but changed many of the settings including seting up velocity sensitivity so that I could play the grains expressively with a MIDI keyboard. Here’s an excerpt from what I played. Once again, no processing was used other than what is built into Granulator.
By now most Ableton users, especially Max for Live developers, know about the latest update and price cuts to Max for Live. Peter Kirn has written a couple of articles on the topic (see Music Patchwork: Ableton Makes Max for Live Cheaper, Showcases Creations by Henke, Hawtin, More and Ableton Delivers Max for Live Improvements and Guidelines, Responds to Feedback). Consequently you may already know that Ableton is giving away several amazing Max for Live instruments. These are perfect devices to explore for my One Synthesizer Sound Everyday project, and although I’m already backed up with weeks worth of analog sounds in the can it won’t hurt to interject some experiments from the M4L pool.
The first one of the new devices that I tried was Granulator by Robert Henke. Within a couple of hours experimenting I had enough material for a couple of weeks! Granulator is brilliant. Having developed my own M4L instrument, Grain Machine, I can really appreciate what Mr. Henke has done here. I even opened up his perfectly organized patch in Max for Live to get a look under the hood and I fully endorse his work (not that this means anything coming from me, but trust me it’s good). Here’s the first of a series of sounds I produced using Granulator with a recording of Three Wind-Up Snow Globes. Absolutely no processing was applied before or after the Granulator instrument, or to the snow globe recording.
As I’ve mentioned in some previous articles, I have been working on a multi-media dance collaboration, Words to Dead Lips, with Annichia Arts since last December that has finally come to a close. We staged three performances at Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis this weekend to a mostly full house. My part in the collaborative effort was to produce the music, and I was given an open mandate to do so. As is my preference, I opted to perform the work to the dance and projected imagery, rather than submit pre-recorded material. Although I adhered to an agreed framework for the soundscape, the improvisational nature of this approach made every performance unique.
The main tool that I used to generate the sound was my Max for Live patch, Grain Machine that explores granular synthesis via a multi-touch controller. I loaded it with five samples including Snow Melting into Lake Superior, One Hundred Sounds in Eight Seconds, High and Low Frequency Drone, and a couple of others for the piece.
Another component to the sonic environment was the noise shield. This device, that I built into saucer sleds, was used by the dancers to synthesize sounds using body contacts and a light dependent resistor. Here’s a five minute excerpt of audio from the closing night’s performance.
Here’s a new look at the Grain Machine M4L device. Since last time I have updated the device to allow drag and drop samples that are stored with the Live set, and added a visual for the filter that’s controlled by the accelerometer on the controller (iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch).
The best thing about using this in Live is being able to live-loop and layer the output from Grain Machine into clips on different tracks, not to mention processing. Another advantage is saving the state of the device in the Live set so that one document has sample set X, while the next has sample set Y. Here’s a piece I created with the Grain Machine in Ableton Live using some samples I randomly selected from my sound library.
Something I have been meaning to do for a while was convert the MaxMSP instrument that I titled the Wavetable Glitch Machine (WTGM) into a Max for Live patch. The WTGM uses a TouchOSC interface running on an iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad to explore samples using granular techniques as well as a virtual scrub dial with friction modeling. Visit the WTGM tag to read more and view a video of it in operation. I have renamed the instrument Grain Machine for the M4L version.
First I prepared the patch for transfer to M4L. This involved making sure that all of the interface objects were in the main patching window, reorganizing the sub-patchers, and cleaning up a variety of other things that I imagined might interfere with the process. Following that, all that was left was copying and pasting the patch into a Max Instrument, replacing some of the standard Max objects with M4L objects, and building a tidy little presentation mode.
Although I had to rework some of the logic and patch cords, the conversion went surprisingly fast. I expected to be working on this for weeks, but it only took me a matter of hours to get it into working order. There is still some fine tuning to be done, but all the necessary functionality is in place. Here’s an audio example I made with a simple breakbeat loaded into the Grain Machine.
I have begun to refine the patch I described in the last entry, creating an instrument that allows you to traverse through samples using an x-y controller and a slider. The x axis controls the forward or backward playback frequency of the grain. The y axis controls the width of the grain; either very narrow (minimum of 10ms), to an adjustable percentage of the sample at the widest (15% by default). The slider controls the position of the grain in the sample. Buttons across the top allow you to choose one of five preset samples. Alternatives can be loaded in the patch or set as defaults.
So far the TouchOSC controller is working quite well for the project. It was a bit tricky getting the interface to reflect changes in the patch, since radio button behavior is not supported in TouchOSC. Fortunately it supports an input port, so I managed to get all the buttons toggled properly by sending data back to the iPod Touch. I have connected the accelerometer to a filter so that when turned on with a toggle, tilting it on the y axis causes a lowpass filter to effect the output. Finally, by setting a threshold on the z axis, giving the iPod Touch a brisk shake will cause the patch to loop a randomly selected grain of random length from a randomly selected buffer played back at a randomly selected rate. The variety of sounds possible with five short samples is huge. Here’s a selection of sound produced with one sample selected. The sound source is from a vintage video game. I’m curious to see if anyone can recognize it. Please post your guess in a comment.
Etude in 8 Bits for Multitouch Graintable Synthesis
I produced this sound by programming a scale in a MIDI clip and then sending it to a virtual instrument designed to allow for freely manipulating granular synthesis through several seven point envelopes. I made several takes while I adjusted the envelops and other parameters.
One warning, this take has some piercingly high frequencies in a few places. The sound reminds me of some sort of scrambled futuristic alarm system. This led me to adding a warehouse reverb to the mix to put in into sci-fi thriller territory.
Reverberated Grain Table Noise
Using the simple granular synth packaged with Pluggo I created this nasty tearing sound. Towards the middle it sounds like it’s causing speaker damage, but don’t worry your speakers are safe. The original waveform was a sawtooth before the grain table algorithms manipulated it as you can see in the image.
Granular synthesis involves separating a waveform into grains that can be rearranged either randomly or with various formulas resulting in dense or scattered clouds of sound particles. For more information about granular synthesis, check out this entry on Wikipedia.