Free Stuff for AudioCookbook Readers

Posted on February 10, 2010 by John CS Keston

Glyn over at ProKits has offered a few free downloads for ACB readers. ProKits is an online resource for custom-made, individual and unique sample kits in formats like Native Instruments Kontakt and Battery. Here’s a few descriptions of their sample kits from Glyn:

Grainy
This instrument is a granular synthesis pad machine created in Kontakt using devious scripting to firing thousands of tiny ‘blips’ at your ears at random. The frequency of the effect can be controlled using the mod-wheel and the custom interface has additional controls for release-time, choral layer volume and distortion. The whole effect created a texture that can go from sonar-ping blippy to the Russian red army chorus to a desert wind howling in the night.

Wooden Frog
A Kontakt instrument created from the humble little wooden percussion frog. A wide selection of sounds were recorded at different velocity levels, with alternate sounds triggered in round-robin fashion, for a very expressive instrument (over 40 samples), going all the way from the frog’s natural range to a pitched-down bass thud.

The Kontakt script has knobs for tuning the sounds, and the mod-wheel brings in an impulse reverb. The reverb is based on an impulse made by my very own acoustic-space modeling program, and is not available anywhere else.

Here’s what Glyn has made freely available for AudioCookbook readers. To extract the RAR files linked below use the password “audiocookbook”.

http://www.prokits.co.uk/user_folder/audiocookbook/mellovtronika_kontakt_prokits.co.uk.rar
http://www.prokits.co.uk/user_folder/audiocookbook/cheesekeys_kontakt_prokits.co.uk.rar
http://www.prokits.co.uk/user_folder/audiocookbook/glassworld_kontakt_prokits.co.uk.rar

GMS Video Experiment with Reason

Posted on December 22, 2009 by John CS Keston

GMS Video Experiment w/ Reason from Dane Messall on Vimeo.

My student, Dane Messall, has been experimenting with the GMS over the break and just posted this video experiment. He imported the video into the GMS and then interfaced it with Reason’s Thor synthesizer to generate the sound. Nice one, Dane!

People on Shelves

Posted on December 19, 2009 by John CS Keston

Andrea Streudel just posted some really nice video documentation of the People on Shelves exhibit that was performed on December 9, 2009 at the West Bank Social Center, using music I created during the show. From the original post, “The world premiere of maw.shelves, a software for dynamic 3-dimensional projection. We overlaid another projector to place our real-time, full-body silhouettes on the “shelves”. Music was performed live by Ostraka.” Checkout Minneapolis Art on Wheels for more details.

Music for People on Shelves

Posted on December 10, 2009 by John CS Keston

people_on_shelves 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.

I used Ableton Live to produce in real-time and my wavetable glitch machine Max patch to make most of the noises, which I routed into Live using Soundflower.

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.

Excerpt from Music for People on Shelves

Traversing Samples with Granular Synthesis

Posted on October 12, 2009 by John CS Keston

messy_patch 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