Time Correction Overload

Posted on April 9, 2009 by John CS Keston

Today during my audio production class I was demonstrating to my students how time correction impacts digital audio when pitch shifting more than a few semitones. To illustrate this I pitched down a chunk of music an octave with the time correction on in Pro Tools. The degradation was clear, but it occurred to me that it would be even more obvious if I shifted it back up to the original pitch with time correction enabled again.

This created an interesting way to effectively down-sample the audio. Intrigued, I applied the same technique over several times to hear what would happen on multiple passes. This is something I’m likely to explore more, but I tried it again on the snippet of music from Unprocessed Rhodes Pedal Noise going down two octaves and back up again. It sounds like the audio has been boiled in a pot of bathroom chemicals. Delicious!

Time Correction Overload

Octave Pedal Bass Harmonics

Posted on April 9, 2009 by Saronni

I don’t really have much to explain about this recording. I was trying to get some dirty warbled sounds by playing my bass through an octave pedal. This is an example of harmonics using just the single lower octave setting. The result is a really fun nasally percussive sound. Perhaps this could be the catalyst for a new Keston and Westdal piece.

Octave Pedal Bass Harmonics

Sticky Buttons on the Talk and Learn

Posted on April 7, 2009 by John CS Keston

Here’s some more of the Talk and Learn Alphabet Center recording. I edited it down to a sequence of numbers. There are some great sample stutters, some deliberate, and some just caused by dirty contacts or sticky buttons.

Sticky Buttons on the Talk and Learn

GMS Interface Design Using controlP5

Posted on April 6, 2009 by John CS Keston

I spent most of my week long break from teaching continuing development of my Gestural Music Sequencer. I’m not sure if I should call it a sequencer or an arpeggiator. It’s really more like an instrument than either of those. The Gestural Musical Instrument perhaps?

Anyway, it’s far from complete, but I added the ability to toggle sustain on the notes as well a menu to choose from available MIDI device drivers. I decided to use a library for Processing called controlP5 to build the UI controls as shown in the screen grab to the right. All of the controls allow keyboard input, so the application can function while the interface is hidden, only displaying the video.

I’m also planning on adding a function to drop video files into the application to create musical phrases from pre-recorded video pieces. Here’s a section of audio captured from the GMS while attached to the Java Sound Synthesizer Sun Microsystems driver. The default sound for this device is an acoustic piano. You can hear the sustain stop around fifteen seconds in then come back on at the end.

GMS Piano Arpeggio