improvisationz

Playing together is not something that comes immediately to people, and forum certainly attested to this. All the same, the improvisation sounded pretty cool, I think it could have improved if people had taken cues, more often, from others. As Stephen mentioned we ‘wanted to avoided sounding like 15 solo performers playing at the same time’ and this was almost getting there.

Vinny would have to be ‘the’ crafty veteran 'round EMU when it comes to improvisatory art, and certainly kept this up during forum by running a video camera at the screen it’s displaying on, so as to create a spontaneous visualisation using the ‘auto-contrast’ on the video camera. I was quite impressed by what Vinny brought to the group.

I noticed John Delany may have been of the few performers adhering to the ‘prose score’ called “play” provided by Stephen. While this asked for short bursts of sound (from two to five seconds) most people just let there oscillators run wild.

I played along side Luke, and ended up merging my instrument with Lukes, using his peizo microphones to pickup the sounds coming from me. Playing a duet on Lukes instrument actually allowed us to craft the sound in a little more into the aesthetic of the score Whittington provided. Although to say there is an aesthetic to that score could be contentious.

.sources.

Whittington, Stephen 18.10.07, "Music Technology Forum," EMU, Adelaide University.

+ spatialisation

.cc - week eleven.

Excuse the brevity, but it's rather late. Here's the Granular Synth with a Quad panner.

stereo pan.mp3 (580 kB) | jam.gransynth~updaaate.zip (20 kB)

I spent quite some time searching for some kind of UI object that I could use to control the panner. The dial object falls short because it does not spin a full 360 degrees. The main one I played with was the LCD one, as it appears in the cartopol help patch, but I just could not get it going, however, I would like to continue this search - particularly in reference to the major project.



.sources.

Haines, Christian 18.10.06, "Spatialisation," EMU, Adelaide University.

+ delay line

.cc - week ten.

Having found my found Granular Synth patch fairly useful, I decided to use this DSP delay task to implement a delay effect into it. Here is my delay line sub-patch...



At the bottom of this picture you can see the delay line, which is a fairly simply delay - allowing for feedback of the delay signal back to create a overdriven tone.


jam.gransynth~3.zip (16 kB) | gransynthdelay.mp3 (476 kB)

I created this short excerpt using the sample I made for jumping into water for my Open Arena project. In this example you can mainly here me toggling the "dry / wet" slider, as the signal becomes 'wetter', you can here the feedback increase and it sounds less like someone going to the toilet.

.sources.

Haines, Christian 11.10.07, "Processing - Delay," EMU, Adelaide University.

amby

.aa - week ten.

To start with I created the ambient backdrop for the level "OA_RPG3DM2," for my open source Quake game. As far as I can tell, there is actually only one sound file being looped as the ambient background for this level, and I can't find the file yet. It sounds like the one file is just being mixed differently for when the player moves in and outside, rather than changing sound files. Not being able to be sure about the specific file yet, I just created a looping 30 second ambient background for the overal level. I used a started with one sample that comes with Reason, in the "Hardcore" Drum Samples for the ReDrum. I plugged this sample, which I called "wink," into my Granular Synth patch, and eventually came up with this:


level ambience.mp3 (356 kB)


In certain parts of my level a loud machine ambiance become very prominent - this sound file I was able to locate in the Open Arena package. The orginal "drone6.wav" (36 kB) sound was actually pretty good to begin with, so I tried to stick fairly close with it. This kind of engine rumble sound reminded me of my Bus environment project from last year, so I quickly fired up my old project patch in Plogue and came up with this asset:


drone6 2.mp3 (90 kB)


The final ambiance I worked on was for the small underwater section. Again I was able to find the original sound files in the package - three sound files, being getting into the water, underwater and getting out of the water (or onset, during and offset). Each of these sound is enclosed in a compressed folder below. To create these sounds I grabbed a droplet sound of soundsnap.com, then processed in my Granular Synth patch. I also used Peak to reverse the offset sound and hack around with it in general:


original water.zip (132 kB) | jake water.zip (384 kB)

.sources.

Haines, Christian 9.10.07, "Ambience (1)," EMU, Adelaide University.

reflection

It's always refreshing to find somebody making “new music” that is still able to hold a human conversation – to laugh and so forth. Equally, it's great to hear an avant-garde musician who states that their way is ‘a’ way, not necessarily ‘the’ way.

Stuart Favilla and Joanne Cannon were an insightful sort, and while their music did not really do it for me, their attitude certainly did. That is to say I respect them – Australians who are pushing the boundaries, and ones who are finding out what the future holds. More of these people are needed!

This session was actually a ‘forum’ in the true meaning of the word – everyone seemed to want to put their two cents in and throw their ideas around. To be honest, it made me miss the days when this is what forum class was all about, I found the discussions intellectually stimulating then and whenever I spoke the pinch of pressure that I’d better have something important to say arouse. It really helped one shape not only their own opinion, but to speak to an audience and to ‘forum’ their ideas. But alas, nowadays ‘forum’ is just another set of instructions, like the rest.

Having digressed (and whinged) considerably, I guess I’ll add now that my own visions of instruments of 21st Century are quite different. I think Ross Bencina was closer to the mark with his interactive glove, I think that we’ll see instruments that map out every parameter, every twitch of the body. Interactive environments are in their own way an instrument, and I think that this is one of the new avenues for musicians.

.sources.

Favilla, Stuart. Cannon, Joanne 4.10.07, "Bent Leather Band," EMU, Adelaide University.

+ fast fourier transform

.cc - week nine.

Finding this weeks tutorials quite difficult, I went to a bit of extra effort trying to work out FFT. This led me to Nathen Wolek's Windowmaker patch, which has all of the typical FFT window types premade.

Implanting this into my own Granular Synth patch took much longer than it should have, but anyway, now I have a Ubumenu allowing the using to select the FFT window type (hamming, triangle and so on). Double clicking on the (unhidden) buffer shows the user a graphical representation of the window:

The aural manipulation which my pFFT patch offers is like the 'noise gate' shown in the tutorial patch.

jam.granFFTsynth~.zip (16 kB)

.sources.

Haines, Christian 4.10.07, "Processing FFT," EMU, Adelaide University.

Open Arena

.aa - week nine.

One day I was backing up an old cassette tape to digital, and I spent some time fiddling around with the tape player and amplifier before I had them going into my laptop at a useful level. In doing this I made a few scratchy recordings before I was able to just get tape, and from one of these recordings comes the basis of my UI mouse-over button sound effect for Open Arena. The first step toward getting the sound to how I wanted it (in my mind) was by doing some EQing – removing that hiss that seems to always come from tapes. Here I used my “favourite” EQer, particularly for this kind of digital Sound Design exercise, which is just the AU Graphic EQ (in Plogue).



One thing I particularly like about starting in Plogue, is that you can easily loop the file, and then you free to do whatever you want to it in real time – and if that means stacking five of the EQs after each other, so be it. Here is how the Plogue patch ended up looking to create the final sound.

Having created a short 'clickly' mouse-over sound that fitted in with the general Industrial aesthetic that I was hoping for, I then decided to make the selection sound aswell. I loaded my original mouse-over sound into Reason this time and added a 'DDL delay-line' and a 'reverb RV7000 unit'. This allowed me to make a slightly altered, attenuated, version of the mouse-over sound. The delay-line is set to 30 ms, making it sound more metallic and the reverb is set pretty low, using the "healings hall.rv7" algorithm.

The next sound I chose to work on was the grenade explosion, as this is one that be quite significant in Open Arena. This was a pretty difficult sound to come up with, but basically I started with a recording of me closing my door. I then time stretched the recording out to double the size. After this I used Plogue / AU plug-ins to compress, spectrally granulate and decimate the sound. I was left with a sound file of about 10 seconds legnth, which I created a 'best-of' of, in Peak.

Finally, I created a walking sound, which I am not particularly happy with. I have already loaded onto fileden.com so I am not going to be bother changing it, but basically from here I think it will need to be pitched down at the least. I created it using white noise, my Granular Synth patch, Plogue's EQ, Compression and also a cool feature of Peak called "Amplitude Fit..."

jake_aa_wk9.zip (74 kB)

.sources.

Haines, Christian 7.10.07, "Assets (1)," EMU. Adelaide University.