“Create random modern art by simplifying images to their core elements.
The output is a geometric composition derived from file data of the original image.”
After:
Before:
Brick adapter
Little Bits meets Lego.
100 years of rock
NASA on Soundcloud
A vocoder in Max
In the frequency domain
By Dude837
download
http://www.otherbirds.com/tutorials/4-vocoder.zip
All tutorials: http://www.otherbirds.com/tutorials
ep-413 week 8
More voices, granular synthesis, convolution in the frequency domain, phasors…
People acting like computers:
- Drummer plays along with a speed-talking auctioneer: https://reactivemusic.net/?p=7140
- Guitarist plays along with crying politician: http://digg.com/video/guitarist-plays-along-to-sobbing-japanese-politician
Fictional language dialog by Naila Burney: https://reactivemusic.net/?p=7242
Vocoders in Max:
- Time domain: Max examples/MSP/classic vocoder
- Frequency domain – By Sam (dude837): http://www.otherbirds.com/tutorials
Phasors and granular synthesis
Phasors: https://reactivemusic.net/?p=17353
Example Max patches:
- phasors: cosine, sine, windows: phasor-stuff.maxpat
- playing an audio file with a phasor: graintest1-phasor-count.maxpat
- granular synthesis: graintest3.maxpat
- More granular synthesis: timestretch5.maxpat
Download these patches from https://github.com/tkzic/max-projects folder: granular-timestretch
More phasors
- Shepard tone upward glissando by Chris Dobrian: https://reactivemusic.net/?p=17255
- “Falling Falling” (Visual Shepard tone) https://reactivemusic.net/?p=17251
- “Toulouse L’autechre” (A synthesizer) By Dude837 https://reactivemusic.net/?p=17347
- Sorting (see video at top of this page)
Books mentioned:
- “Designing Sound” by Andy Farnell
- “Computer Music Tutorial” By Chris Roads
Assignment: due in class 10/27/2014
Composition: Sound-byte
- The sound-byte is a short audio clip of speech.
- The speech can come from anywhere. Something familiar, something famous, something unusual.
- Every sound in the composition is derived only from the sound-byte. You can use any tool or method.
- The sound-byte in its original form should occur somewhere in the piece
- Duration: roughly 2-3 minutes? That is up to you.
Phasor
Engine of time.
from Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phasor
Traveling along the outer edge of the circle, the distance goes from 0 to 2*PI radians, then starts over again. In degrees it would be 0 to 360. A clock goes from 0 to 12. In Max and Pd the phasor~ objects are normalized to run from 0.0 to 1.0. Think of flattening out the edge of the circle to a straight line.
The phasor as input to a sine or cosine function generates one cycle of a wave for each revolution – as shown in the above animation. For example, cosine would go from 0 to 1 to 0 to -1 to 0.
If you graph the phasor value, it looks like a sawtooth wave – rising in a ramp from 0.0 to 1.0 then falling straight down to 0.0 to start again.
With waves, the distance around the circle represents time (or phase), the projected cosine value represents amplitude.
In science…
“A phasor can be considered a vector rotating about the origin in a complex plane. The cosine function is the projection of the vector onto the real axis. Its amplitude is the modulus of the vector, and its argument is the total phase 
. The phase constant 
represents the angle that the vector forms with the real axis at t = 0.”
-WIkipedia
In art…
“And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game.”
-Joni Mitchell
(These lyrics happen at about 4:40 in the video…)
Suspense
Heterodyne filter in Max
Multiply by an analytic signal to detect the frequency of a sine wave.
When the frequencies match, the sum of the real and imaginary parts will be positive.
References:
- C. Roads, “Computer Music Tutorial” p. 548-549, “Heterodyne Filter Analysis”
- Allan Seago, “Heterodyne Analysis”, http://allanseago.com/Heterodyneanalysis/heteroanalysis.html
- Michael A. Soderstrand, “Adaptive Heterodyne Filters” http://cdn.intechopen.com/pdfs-wm/17796.pdf
download
max-projects on Github: https://github.com/tkzic/max-projects
folder: heterodyne-filter
patch: heterodyne-test3.maxpat
Spectral freeze in Max
By Jean Francois-Charles
Freeze sounds with Max MSP Jitter using FFT and Inverse FFT. For this video to be really useful, you will need to download the free Max/MSP/Jitter patches on http://www.cycling74.com/share.html
To get more “under the hood” insight, download the free article “A Tutorial for Spectral Sound Processing with Max/MSP and Jitter” http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/comj.2008.32.3.87
note: local patches in tkzic/jfcharles/