Once again, here’s the same electric piano from Processing Sound Using Photoshop. This time is has been liquefied by the Photoshop filter of the same name. Liquefy is nice because is relies on the human element of dragging through the image to warp it in the direction the mouse pointer is moved. I purposefully did not liquefy short sections of the waveform so I could compare the original signal and the manipulated one.
Liquified Electric Piano Pattern
The Spherize filter in Photoshop is designed to force an image to bubble outward as if wrapping it around a sphere. Can you imagine what it would sound like to warp audio in the same fashion? I imagined that that the frequency would warp downward as the waveform was stretched and then back up to the original pitch on the opposite side.
Well, that’s almost exactly what happened, although I didn’t expect it to sound as deep and eerie as it does. For this entry I have shortened the image horizontally to emphasize what the filter actually did. I also lightened the image to make it more visible. It looks a bit like a zeppelin whereas the original image of the sound was flat. Please enjoy the Spherized version of the loop from the last entry.
Spherize Electric Piano Pattern
Sound designers, musicians, producers and engineers are all familiar with manipulating sound through the use of audio processing. Most examples of processing, like filters, reverbs, and delays produce a relatively predictable result. I’m interested in processing that has an unpredictable result. For example, the octave pedal that purrs like a robotic kitten when you feed it harmonic input, that I wrote about in Octave Pedal Rhodes. I have a similar interest in producing sound directly from visual media with tools like Michel Rouzic’s Photosounder, which I used for Conversion of Graffiti into Sound.
One of the first things I tried to do with Photosounder was to capture the image it creates from imported audio in order to use an image editing application as an audio processor. This didn’t work very well because much of the resolution was lost with the screen grab. Since then, Michel has added a feature to export full resolution spectral images of sound. This makes the concept of using a Photoshop filter as an audio processor possible.
To test this concept I created a simple pattern with an electric piano patch and opened it in Photosounder. Without changing any settings I immediately saved the sound as a bitmap image. Next I opened the image in Photoshop and started experimenting with filters. Once I had some filtered images I loaded them back into Photosounder to see how they sounded. Gaussian blur and Liquefy created some unique effects, but my favorite of the bunch was Glowing Edges. This filter seems to transform the electric piano into a haunting choral passage.
Original Electric Piano Pattern
Glowing Edges Electric Piano Pattern
While working in the studio recently I plugged in a cable from an auxiliary send to record some bass and got some horrible feedback. So horrible that I was determined to record it. The reason I was getting the feedback was because the same send that I was using to record the bass happened to be turned up on the channel that I was using to monitor the signal. I realized this immediately, but the sound was quite interesting due to the subtle latency on the signal path caused by the digital hardware involved. Here’s a couple of layers of the feedback running through reverb. I also made adjustments to the pitch a time stretched the recording in a few places.
Accidental Cable Noise
I recently recorded a few passages of clavinet on a piece I’ve been working on for a while. My Hohner E7 is still in disrepair, so I had to rely on a sampled version of the instrument. I processed the sampled version in a similar way to how I would have processed the real thing.
Generally I tend to try new things rather than rely on previous settings and techniques, however, I almost always starts with compression on the clav. This time, I followed the compression with amp modeling, chorus, and reverb. The context is the key to what kind of processing I’ll use on this versatile instrument.
Fire Diamond Segment