Grain Machine Sample from Live Performance

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Here’s a sound I produced during a live set at Nick and Eddie for the Thursday Funhouse series under my Ostraka moniker. You can download the entire set that I released as a holiday gift last month. I used Grain Machine which is a touch based granular synthesis instrument that I developed in Max for Live to create the sound. Grain Machine requires a device running TouchOSC such as an iPhone, iPod Touch, or Android device for the touch based control. There’s a rotary wheel with friction modeling, and an x-y pad for granular exploration.

Grain Machine from Thursday Funhouse

Auto Octave Filter Sweep

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Here’s a test composition using another patch I created for Curve titled Auto Octave Filter Sweep by AudioCookbook. On this patch I used two of the LFOs. The first one I setup to alternate between the octaves with a square wave, and the second I used with a sign wave to modulate the cutoff frequency on the filter configured with a 24dB low pass filter. On the second LFO I used the fixed rate that ranges from 0.020 hertz all the way up to 5.24 kilohertz. I mapped a MIDI controller to the LFO speed and adjusted it over the full range during the sequence. I also made adjustment to the cutoff frequency, resonance, and envelopes during the 5:20 minute recording.

Auto Octave Filter Sweep

Sequence Made with Curve Shared Preset Synthesizer

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Cableguys.de have recently released an excellent community-driven software synthesizer called Curve (downloadable demo available). The synth has three, aliasing-free oscillators, three five stage envelopes, two filters each with ten modes, and four LFOs that are either, beat, note, or frequency synced. One of the coolest things you can do is draw your waveforms in the editor. You can even randomize them for some interesting results. Here’s a sequence that I created and recorded without any processing using Curve. This is one of my first attempts at creating a patch in Curve and I shared it to the preset community (available within Curve’s interface) as Bouncy Arpeggiator by AudioCookbook. Stay tuned for a lot more from this powerful and great sounding software synth.

Cables Guys Curve Sequence

Sounds from a Contact Mic Frozen in Water Ice

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Freezing the mic outside overnight

I just got a note from Dan Pugsley of Radium Audio. regarding their new resource Radium Audio Labs. The site will feature a broad variety of sound experiments and explorations. Dan writes,

“Radium Audio has recently started a blog demonstrating some of our explorative processes, and though it’s very much in the early stages of development we have some pretty interesting pieces uploaded already and I was wondering if any of it might be suitable for Audio Cookbook? We have two new explorative projects in the works at the moment, one of which is based on binaural recordings and the other will be revolving around the use of dry ice to create a variety of sounds.”

The projects posted so far include using a coil mic to record the electromagnetic fields from various electronic devices, like an iPhone and a printer/scanner, and my favorite at the moment, sounds captured from a contact microphone frozen in water ice as it melts.


Frozen Contact Mic in Ice by Radium-Audio

Example of Posc from Live Performance

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I extracted this recording of the Posc from a performance of Words to Dead Lips at Intermedia Arts last November. I left the processing on it that I had used during the performance. At some point I’m going to acoustically record one of the “noise shields” that built for the dancers to use in the piece as a comparison. The “noise shields” have a distinctive sound tailored by the amplification, speaker, and the body of the instrument that is quite different for the direct sound below.

Words to Dead Lips Posc Example