With help from Josh Clos I have shot a short video documenting what my latest MaxMSP project does.
It’s a sort of swiss army knife of wavetable glitch machine and sample scrubbing tools. Hopefully the video will shed some light on what this project is about. I’ve been trying to describe it in a few other posts without much success, but seeing it in action seems to make a bit more sense.
Here’s a screen grab of a patch I’m working on to successively loop five phrases of sound repetitively. For example, looping another phrase after the fifth time will replace the first and so on. The goal of this patch is to allow me to feed in audio signals from my multi-touch glitch machine into the looper so I can build compositions for a five speaker sound art installation I’m doing at the end of this semester at the University of Minnesota.
For the example I routed outputs 1, 3 and 5 to the left channel and outputs 2 and 4 to the right channel. I also temporarily generated a randomly pitched sinusoid to run into the looper for testing. The large toggle in the upper left initiates the looping and pressing it again stops it. Currently there’s no mechanism to find zero crossings, so the result has lots of clicking in the output. To make good use of the clicks (I’ll be fixing this later) I routed the output into Ableton Live, and loaded on heaping portions of distortion and delay. If life gives you clicks, make click-on-aid.
Some of you might not be aware of the process to get electronic promos of my music for reviewers, radio, music blogs, publications, music venues, etc. If you’re in any way involved in the music industry please complete the Unearthed Music Service List Application.
As soon as your application is processed you will have access to download full length 320kbps MP3 files of all of the music currently available on Unearthed Music including my solo album, Precambrian Resonance by Ostraka. Don’t worry about being spammed because we send out no more that five or six mailings per year. Here’s Blitzen Machine.
For the last two weeks I have been working on a performance application that I’m developing in MaxMSP controlled with TouchOSC on the iPhone or iPod Touch. The application is coming along quite well. I have the granular traversal piece working how I want, as I described in Traversing Samples with Granular Synthesis.
Now I’m working on another feature of the application designed to allow the user to play samples with a rotary dial; not unlike manually spinning a record on a turntable. The basics of getting this going were pretty simple, but I also wanted to be able to spin the dial and have it continue to rotate based on the acceleration applied. Secondly, I wanted to have a slider that would adjust the amount of friction, from frictionless to instant braking.
This essentially involved physically modeling the control to behave like a turntable or other spinning device. After trying four or five techniques using standard Max objects I managed to get it working, but it wasn’t pretty. Instead I decided to try using a few lines of Javascript to do the calculations and adjust the position of the dial. This worked much better and only required about 35 lines of code. The best way to illustrate this application will be with video. I’ll shoot a few minutes to get the point across and share it here soon. For now here’s a recording made with the modeled controller I described and just a small amount of friction.
My friend and hiphop producer Cornelius Noll (aka 84 Caprice) recently offered to share a track on ACB that he produced for the Renoise Efficient Music Competition. I just got a chance to preview the track, and while I’ve been quite fond of 84 Caprice all along, he has managed to conjure something special this time. Here’s what he had to say about his process and working in Renoise.
This particular track is one that started out as an instrumental for Prof, an MC on Stophouse Records where I get most of my work done. The original draft was created in a program called Renoise which falls under the category of “tracker” or “tracking sequencer”. It quickly became an exercise of figuring out how to truly work the insides of the program it was created in for a contest conceived by Renoise and Indamixx in conjunction with CreateDigitalMusic.com. Upon initial approach it looks like this; make a bomb track and license it under Creative Commons. I won’t discuss C.C. But will rattle a bit about Renoise and the technicalities of making fight-night weight.
These days I typically use a piano to work out ideas and then graduate into software to execute them. Renoise tends to be my favorite place to land as it loads up like butter and is quick for nailing down concepts. The implied constraints of this contest, however, had hoisted a series of difficulties in my process. The first being that while I like to use VST/VSTi’s in the process, non-native sound creators or effectors were not to be used in the final version. The second concern was the size of the Renoise file as the winning entry will be used as one of the demos within the program (I haven’t had to deal with file size since I turned my 1.44meg floppies into coasters). Third concern – CPU usage. I was shooting for a great track weighing in under 5 megs. My rough track was loaded with complex VST/VSTi’s and was well over 20 megs.
The process was actually more focusing than I imagined. Imbedded capabilities include “rendering” which allows creation of samples of MIDI performance very similar to a “bounce to disk” but without leaving the program. This proved helpful with some of the trickier performance passages. It also lent itself well to taking a small sample of more simple instruments allowing for creation of patches (which I have never made the time to do in Renoise). If you look at the file itself you will find within it instruments which approach “chip-tune” file size all the while maintaining my vision for a very anthemic quality to them. I found as I rooted through the sequences and the instruments that my samples were converted at 32 bit 44.1khz; this was rectifiable within the program. I reduced resolution on lower frequency and less important pieces. These were huge in dropping file size down.
Skipping ahead a number of hours, we now have the track entirely reconfigured. No external instruments. No external effects. Less than 3.5 megs (this just blows me away). While the original track would load my laptop to as much as 40% CPU usage, the current CPU loading on my laptop does not exceed 11%.
For the last two weeks I have been working on a performance application that I’m developing in 