2007 – Sem2 – CC1 – Week 11 – Integrated Setup (3)

This function in Live is surprisingly cool, once Edward showed me how to add the Impulses which I seemed to have missed during the lecture that is. This is a rather simple little tune created from random snippets from the supplied guitar file, but it demonstrates the MIDI Impulse function well. I can see a tune like this being used in an adventure game. Again, the surprisingly ease of use and the fact that one sound can be morphed this easily into something different great and is totally practical in soundscapes and effects. I’ll be using this to create my rhythm track for the major assignment.
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Audio

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Haines, Christian. 2007. “CC1 – Performance Sequencing(1).” Seminar presented at the University of Adelaide, 16th October.

Live. 1999-2007. Ableton AG.

2007 – Sem2 – AA1 – Week 11 – Sound generation – Spectral Synthesis

FFT for me will certainly have its use in the future, but at the moment I am lost in the thought of knowing how to make an exact sound I want from scratch, ie not by randomly fiddling about. I would like to get to a point where I know the exact frequencies and shapes to create for the sound I need at that particular time. At present, it all seems a little random and whatever sounds we get seem to be by pure chance. Most of the sounds I ended up with when experimenting with white noise were variations of the “raindrops” that were made in class. I did expect to be able to make pretty much anything imaginable with the white noise since it contains every frequency. I got better results by importing real audio and changing the window parameters, varying the frequency of the filter and speeding and slowing down the audio itself. If I was to manipulate audio at its sinusoidal level, then Spear would be quicker and easier, but of course we could not add envelopes and such to it. Speaking of which, I tried adding an ADSR on an audio file and realised it only accepted a gate input and so far all I can see with gate outputs is a MIDI bidule such as Note Grabber. Can anyone tell me how to add an ADSR to affect audio. Pretty please.

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Audio

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Haines, Christian. 2007. “AA1-FM Synthesis” Seminar presented at the University of Adelaide, 18th October.

Plogue Bidule. 2001-2007 Plogue Art et Technologie, Inc

2007 – Sem2 – Forum – Week 10 – Instrument Show And Tell

Well we got to show off our instruments we have been building/making/destroying. It was interesting. I particularly liked the square wave generators a couple of students had made that were performed by placing the hands over light sensitive resistors. I would like to make one of these for myself some time down the track as I think my kids would get a kick out of playing with something like this. Unfortunately some students instruments didn’t work or were being temperamental on the day, including mine, but hopefully it will be sorted by next week. All in all pretty cool and I will no doubt explore the art of circuit bending more in the holidays. I admit I was one of the more vocal skeptics, but I must admit this exercise has opened up more ideas and avenues for musical creation. I don’t look at toys the same way anymore. There is always a thought of how it could be bent into something cool.

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Whittington, Steven. And all us Tech dudes. 2007. “Circuit Bending Forum” Seminar presented at the University of Adelaide, 11th October.

2007 – Sem2 – CC1 – Week 10 – Integrated Setup (2)

Things went rather well with this. Since I took up the last blog with AA stuff I thought I would just put everything in this blog. Last week was to use Live and Bidule together and link a few variables for automation. This week we expanded on that and used more links to automate different things. I worked with Bradley in setting up an oscillator to control panning of channel 1 on the mixer, this also controlled the wet/dry amount on a reverb and Tristan played guitar that was recorded into Live. This was a rather simple setup, but the fact that loops were recorded straight to Live immediately and placed into the slots easily and quickly opened up a possible idea for my CC major project that I’ll send to you now.

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Audio

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Haines, Christian. 2007. “AA1-FM Synthesis” Seminar presented at the University of Adelaide, 11th October.

Plogue Bidule. 2001-2007 Plogue Art et Technologie, Inc

2007 – Sem2 – AA1 – Week 10 – Sound generation – Additive Synthesis

I was quite pleased with my recent understanding of Bidule. I found making this bidule patch easy. I ended up making an additive synth with ten waveform possibilities. I was going to add an LFO today, but the trial has expired. So instead of starting from scratch at Uni, I’ll blog what I have. I am confident I have this right as I was able to reproduce the ‘pumpkin smile’ with the first two waveforms, one starting at 0 and the other at +0.75. It’s not even Halloween yet.

The waveform below I posted because I thought it was interesting. Essentially a waveform in a waveform was produced by panning the first wave left and the other centred while mucking around with frequency settings.



Although my soundfile does not include sounds I will use for my final project, (as the trial period expired) I will definitely be able to make some chirping sounds when I remake the patch at Uni.
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The audio is basically me mucking around with the settings so there isn’t really any parts of significance so I didn’t include a pic of it with markings. Until I add the filters and the LFO it is just a lot of different frequency tones and not synthesised sounds based on anything real.
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Haines, Christian. 2007. “AA1-Additive Synthesis” Seminar presented at the University of Adelaide, 9th October.

Plogue Bidule. 2001-2007 Plogue Art et Technologie, Inc

2007 – Sem2 – Forum – Week 9 – Bent Leather workshop

I was quite interested in this. I thought the unusual instruments were extremely cool and made great sounds. That is until they said the instrument sounds were generated by VST plugins. What a letdown. After weeks of making, programming and bending our own instruments I thought they had done a similar thing but on a larger and more complicated scale, but really it was just a homemade bassoon and MIDI light harp. No different really than me bringing my homemade bass to Uni and playing through plugins to create a bunch of weird sounds. The only thing really to take from this was the fact that mic placement had a great effect on the timbral quality. For example, the wind instruments were basically just the same as any other wind instrument except the pickup was placed near the reed so as to pick up higher harmonics to create scratchier sounds to be manipulated with plugins. Also, the next time you record say a bassoon or sax just bang your finger on the contact mic while they’re playing. It was entertaining, but from an instrument building perspective, meh. Personally, I found Reed Ghazala's work more interesting. He even looks more interesting.

Look at me. I'm a crazy circuit bender that collects mushrooms.

Now this is a home made instrument.

2007 – Sem2 – CC1 -Week 9 – Integrated Setup (1)

Ok, I’m a bit behind. Edward and I got it all to work in Studio 5, but it did keep crashing quite a few times so we gave up and decided to record our own tunes at home. Well I’m having trouble again as I can’t seem to automate panning and such on their own. When I link things together, the panning for example only moves when I physically change the wave type on my oscillator with the mouse. So I’m obviously missing something so I’ll ask Edward tomorrow and hopefully have something to blog then.
The good thing is that after talking with Edward about my FM patch that didn’t seem to work, the problem seemed to be in the frequency settings. The amplitude was too low and the frequency too high to affect the carrier (doh!), so I lowered the frequency setting and made the amplitude setting larger and hey presto, it works. Yay!!! It’s the wrong blog but here’s the FM patch and a pic. Since I was on a roll, I also added an LFO and played around with that. Interestingly, and obviously in hindsight, the waveform is an exact replica of the waveform selected in the LFO. The lower pic (in which I used the LFO) starts with a sine wave and then I flicked it to a sawtooth. I am smurt.

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Audio
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Haines, Christian. 2007. “AA1-FM Synthesis” Seminar presented at the University of Adelaide, 4th October.

Plogue Bidule. 2001-2007 Plogue Art et Technologie, Inc

2007 – Sem2 – AA1 – Week 9 – Sound Generation – FM Synthesis

Sigh. Well I can’t get any sound out of my FM patch. It all seemed simple enough in theory – have a carrier wave modulated by another wave. How can this possibly be difficult??? It doesn’t seem to work for me and after everything else stuffing up, I guess I should have expected this. As for sideband calculating it might as well be written in Japanese. I don’t understand it at all.

After some more mucking around I seem to have sound, but it doesn’t seem to make the same various sounds as in class. As for part 3 of the exercise, this patch just makes the one noise, so it is probably wrong and therefore it seemed pointless to continue.

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Bidule file (help)

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Haines, Christian. 2007. “AA1-FM Synthesis” Seminar presented at the University of Adelaide, 2nd October.

Plogue Bidule. 2001-2007 Plogue Art et Technologie, Inc

2007 – Sem2 – Forum – Week 9 - The Instrument

Judging by the other blogs, we're supposed to post a write up about our instrument. Ok, it worked until a day ago until the circuit board broke. So I've wasted weeks of work and about $60 on parts, tools and paint for a piece of plastic shit that no longer works. I have no instrument so I guess just put me down for another fail. Have a nice day.

Ok, I figured I might as well put up my progress shots of the instrument getting painted. It seems painting all those model X-Wings, Warhammer figures and Klingon Birds of Prey finally came in handy.

A bit of a sand and it is ready to be painted.


Applying of undercoat.


A bit of paint to spruce it up.




All done.