Audio Cookbook

Snyderphonics Manta

Recently I read an article in Future Music on the Snyderphonics Manta OSC controller. I’m getting more and more into OSC (Open Sound Control), so this is a really fascinating device that I can see replacing and expanding upon what I’m building for the iPod Touch. The Manta has forty-eight touch sensors on a six by eight pad. Each sensor can handle note on/off and velocity information, which you can’t do on the iPod Touch. It also has two touch sliders and four touch buttons, all assignable via OSC, or MIDI with a free application that’s available on synderphonics.com. The device also accepts input in order to provide feedback via LEDs that back light the controls. I have been researching and experimenting with multitouch devices to do music and sound design for a while now, and the Manta seems to solve a lot of shortcomings of other devices. Congratulations to Jeff Snyder for designing a unique and intriguing instrument.

Monophonic Step Sequencer Max Patch Download

Here’s an archive that contains the patch and a standalone application (Mac OSX only) of the step sequencer that I built in MaxMSP a few days ago. The sequencer works pretty well sending MIDI, but I haven’t really fine tuned the internal synthesis. Currently it uses a function object with an adjustable domain to adjust the amplitude envelope of a sinusoidal, but if the note length (function domain) is either too short or too long, clicks occur between notes. What I need to do is ramp up or down to the proper level for each new note. I’ll post an update here when I come up with a solution. If any Max veterans out there have any suggestions, please feel free to post a comment.

MonoStepSequencer.zip

Real Time Sound Design Performance for Theater

Hello ACB readers! My name is Kyle Vande Slunt and I’m a sound designer living in Minneapolis, MN. I’ve been a big fan of ACB for sometime and John has graciously allowed me to contribute. I look forward to posting more sounds and articles and hearing your feedback. Its great to meet all of you.

Back in November 2008 I was commissioned by the Open Eye Figure Theater in Minneapolis to create sound design for a new work by Michael Sommers entitled “Snowman”. The play was a sound designers dream: a magical fable told through people, puppets, animations, multiple projections, and some “LOST” like magic. The goal was to create an entire world of ambiances, sounds, and transitions that belonged to this snowy world that my have existed in the past or possibly in the far future.

Doubling as the show’s audio engineer, I had to devise a way to trigger (perform) all of these sounds and the recorded musical score for each performance. Normally in smaller theaters, this feat is accomplished by putting everything onto a playable CD or loaded into QLab (a popular Mac based sound program for theater). For Snowman however, I needed to be able to trigger all of these elements and have them be completely independent of each other for layering, mixing, and effects purposes. And in some cases these elements needed to be triggered very quickly.

The solution: I loaded all of my audio clips (sfx, loops, music, etc) into a highly organized Ableton Live session (see picture) and assigned MIDI notes to trigger the clips. In Live you can only assign one note to a clip, so each clip had to be a different note on the keyboard. So I went through and logically mapped the notes of the keyboard to the sounds and music for the show. I used black keys for music and the white keys for sound effects and ambiances, labeling each key with electoral tape and a description. As you can see in the picture, I used only white and yellow tape. Anything more saturated in hue would have been impossible to read in the dark booth. The white tape is MIDI channel 1 and the yellow tape is MIDI channel 2. (I switched MIDI channels instead of octaves to avoid labeling hassles.) Each channel of audio was then assigned to my BCF-2000 where I had mixing control for every track using multiple fader
banks. The BCF’s knob banks came in handy for sending the audio to
return tracks for real-time effect manipulation.

Each show felt like a performance where I was jamming away on my weird Snowman keyboard while layering and effecting sounds at the same time. Just for fun I’ve included a small collage of some of the sounds from the show. Enjoy!

Snowman Collage

My Favorite GMS Generated Melody So Far

I’ve been spending most of my limited spare time practicing with the GMS in preparation for tomorrow nights performance in Minneapolis. While practicing tonight I produced this melody. I was controlling the sequencer with a blinking led, spinning top and randomly looped this sequence of notes.

I’ve since built a track around it with more loops from the GMS, but it sounds good on its own. The nice thing about this technique is that everything I capture is MIDI, so if I get a good melody, but don’t like the sound, it’s easy to change the timbre, tempo, transposition, etc. In other words, beyond being a performance tool, I can use it effectively for composition and idea gathering.

My Favorite GMS Generated Melody So Far

GMS Practice Track Number 3

I’ve almost finished with my initial round of tweaking and bug fixing on the GMS, so I’ve finally been able to put a bit more time into actually using the software for its intended purpose. My most recent work with it involves a companion document in Ableton Live that loads a number of virtual instruments into about nine separate MIDI tracks. Ableton provides the external sync via the Apple IAC (Inter-Application Communication) drivers. In turn, the GMS sends MIDI note on and off data to the instruments in Ableton. Using this method I can live loop on various tracks and build a multi-timbral composition in real-time. Here’s an example for a recent practice session.

GMS Practice Practice Track Number 3

External Sync Feature Added to the GMS

With some expert help from Grant Muller I have successfully added the capability of synchronization with an external MIDI signal to the GMS. This feature opens up vast possibilities for performance and collaboration with the tool. To test the feature I sent external sync from Ableton Live to the GMS, which in turn routed note information back through the IAC drivers into Ableton to drive a VST FM synth. I started by live looping a few phrases from the sequencer including a bass line, mid-range arpeggio, and some heavily delayed FM clav, then put it together with a recycled beat into a two minute micro-track. Everything heard, except the drums, are notes output from the GMS via video stimulus.

GMS External Sync Test

Chromatic Currents Part II

This second part to “Chromatic Currents” was produced with the GMS by using a string of lights placed into a large glass vase. I moved the camera around the vase to direct the flow of musical phrases with one hand while I adjusted transposition and note duration settings in the sequencer with my right.

You might notice that the video stimulus does not resemble lights in a vase. This is because I applied a negative filter to the video after capturing the performance. Once again I used a pleasant pentatonic scale interspersed with rare dissonant notes and probability distributions in the note durations to give it an eerie awkwardness.

GMS: Chromatic Currents Part II from Unearthed Music on Vimeo.

Chromatic Currents Part I

Here’s a segment of sound from another GMS video I produced yesterday called Chromatic Currents. Once again I was letting the visuals drive the piece, while I controlled parameters in the GMS. On Sound Globules I used the circle of fourths with probability distributions so that C was the most frequent note followed by F, Bb, Eb and so on. I really liked the rare dissonant pitch making its way into the sequence, so I tried a similar technique for Chromatic Currents. The scale was strongly C minor pentatonic, weighted with the Dorian mode by adding less-likely probabilities for D and A. However, every note that was not part of the scale still had a small possibility of occurring. This led to occasional blue or dissonant pitches in the stream of notes. The possibility of having any note within a chromatic scale occur in the stream led me to the title.

Chromatic Currents

GMS Videos and Interface

Today I made two more videos with the GMS using a different technique than in Dodger of Red Lights. This time I wanted to explore what could be produced using visual input that I wasn’t directly controlling. The obvious, albeit cheesy, lava lamp came to mind, so I turned it on and went to work.

I connected a separate video camera via firewire, leaving a screen with all my interface controls available for me to tweak while recording. I recorded the video to MiniDV on the external camera, and as before recorded the output onto my PCM-D50 to free up the CPU for Reason and the GMS. Since I was recording the video on the external camera I had to the flip the video so that the image corresponded properly with the sound. This led me add a feature for toggling the mirroring in the GMS.

Click the image to see a full sized screen shot of the interface. All three videos are available on the Unearthed Music Vimeo account. Here’s an excerpt of audio from the piece titled Sound Globules.

GMS: Sound Globules

GMS Piece: Dodger of Red Lights

Today I decided to see if I could create a version of what I performed at the MAW outing last night, as a streaming video with good quality sound. I opted not to use screen capture software so that all the processing on my Macbook Pro could go into rendering the images and sound. The imagery was created by manipulating a red, LED, bike light near the lens of the camera. The screen was then shot with a second camera while the audio was recorded externally using my PCM-D50.

I built a pentatonic scale using the note probability distribution feature in the GMS. The most likely note was a C followed by D, G, G#, and then B natural. I also used the probability distributions on the durations to get some stumbling rhythms centered around sixteenth notes.

Dodger of Red Lights from Unearthed Music on Vimeo.