Audio Technology Research Funding

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After nearly two years free of advertising, I have decided to include sponsorships on AudioCookbook. This was not a decision that came easily, but I concluded that advertising was not bothering me on other sites, similar to ACB that I visit regularly, so perhaps it won’t bother me here. In any case, all the funds that are collected from sponsors and donations will go into an account that will be used exclusively for research projects that will be featured on ACB. The cost of the equipment and software that I purchase for these projects will surely exceed any income by these means, but perhaps it will help offset the expense.

What helped lead me down this path was an offer from TuneCore to participate in their affiliate program. I am one of the partners of Unearthed Music and we have used TuneCore for digital distribution since September, 2006. We have used other distribution and licensing agencies before, and still do (until we can get out of our contracts), but what makes TuneCore unique is that they do not take a percentage of your royalties. Instead they charge a one-time delivery fee, followed by affordable yearly storage fees. Our label has had much better returns with TuneCore than other services, so I feel comfortable endorsing them.

I hope the advertising on ACB does not turn anyone away. I plan to keep the ads discreet and the content of the same nature as it has been for the last year and ten months. No reviews, just continued experimentation and research into whatever weird and wonderful sound discoveries we make or find along the way. If you have thought on this, please share them. Reader feedback, comments and opinions are one of the main reasons why I continue to create content for ACB.

Multitouch Rotary Dial and X-Y Granular Exploration

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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.

The next step invovles integrating this tool into the Five Output Atemporal Looper i describe in my last entry.

For more information check out some of the related posts including Physically Modeling Multitouch Controls, Traversing Samples with Granular Synthesis, and TouchOSC Controlled Glitch Looper in MaxMSP.

Multitouch Rotary Dial and X-Y Granular Exploration from Unearthed Music on Vimeo.

Five Output Atemporal Looper

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5_out_looperHere’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.

Clicky Five Ouput Atemporal Looper Example

A Quick Note About My Music

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Precambrian ResonanceSome 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.

Blitzen Machine
– Precambrian Resonance, Ostraka

Physically Modeling Multitouch Controls

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spinnerFor 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.

Percussion Loop Spinning