2nd Post

2. New Ideas

sabrehart / October 28, 2013

I have been thinking a lot about this module and what I want to achieve in it. Interactive Sound Environments is a rather vague and potentially vast topic to explore so trying to find a focus has been giving me some trouble. However, i am now thinking about what i feel is lacking in my own music and what tools i might be able to design that would help me create better and more unique tracks.

When i look at the electronic musicians i most admire such as Jon Hopkins, Clark, Amon Tobin and Autechre it is their sound design that is the most impressive part for me. They all use elements of found sounds in their music and this is a tradition that goes back t the earliest pioneers of electronic music such as Pierre Schaeffer and the Musique Concrete movement. I have been using found sounds in my music too with some success but i feel i am relying on the same processes and my ideas are getting stale.  I am therefore going to look at ways i can use Max MSP to inhance my use of found sounds and improve my sound design. The areas i want to focus on are granular synthesis and vocoding and i also want to investigate drum synthesis, wave tables and pitch shifting.

Today i have been reading about granular synthesis and building some simple granular patches. Above is one of my first attempts which i built following a tutorial by Rupa Dhillon which i found here: http://www.cs.au.dk/~dsound/DigitalAudio.dir/Papers/IntroToGranSynth.pdf

The patch is single grain strand produce by using an envelope and cycle~ object which is an oscillator. It is then split and one stream goes through a delay line and the other is pitch shifted.

I then went on to build another version which had a few more controls and used audio files instead of the cycle~ object. This one also used the random object to affect the length of the grains and the amount they were shifted by.

In the second patch the granular parts are encapsulated within the p gran object shown below.

I found this video about the making of Amon Tobin’s The Foley Room album very useful and inspiring. The film shows the lengths he and his crew went to to collect interesting sounds in order to make the album.