CC2 - Week 8 - MIDI and MSP

After much tribulation, here it is. I have gone a little further than just applying MIDI controls, and built a whole new concept of selecting sections of a waveform. The user can select a control device, which is used to change the size of the selection. This selection can then be shifted left or right along the wavetable using the pitchbend wheel. This pic shows how full on it was just to make it do this.



Although it took ages, the result is really cool and worth the hassle. Some of the other patch controls are also controllable by a MIDI device, however we all know how that works. Space bar now turns the patch on and off. There will be no huge MP3 of this weeks task, as it would sound identical to last week, however here is a little snippet of what my new control scheme can do... cancel that, I can't get anything to record on the Macs. Why is there no option to record just the system sound? Nothing in Audacity or Peak, the recorder in Max has "unable to access..." errors, and I don't have any MIDI input devices for my laptop to do it on there. Grr. Here's the patch etc.
~ZIP 544KB~

Forum - Week 5 - Circuit Bending II

This week seems to have slipped through the cracks, as Jake and I seem to have forgotten to post about it. In any case, all of our toys had been broken, except for the phone, so we endeavored to permanently attach a pitch-changing potentiometer. Which we did, along with speaker wires and battery wires. Here's the picture:



We did try buying other toys, however they indubitably turned out crap, such as:



Which didn't even work. Although we did get some cool robot-head LED's from them. Good times!



Seb Tomczak. "Music Technology Forum - Circuit Bending II" Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 23rd August, 2007.

Forum - Week 6 - Physical Computing

Square wave in ya face! This week was my first experience with physical computing, and undoubtedly not my last. Controlling physical circuits with Max and vice-versa was good fun (when it worked), and it seems like there would be a huge range of possibilities when introducing a computer to a simple circuit.



The above video shows a Max slider controlling the data flow into the breadboard, which not surprisingly has a square wave sound (what with those 0's and 1's). The following video shows how we created the square wave sound without Max, using a potentiometer instead.



As you cannot see the circuit very well in the video, here's a photo of it.



The final exercise was the most interesting- controlling sliders in Max with voltage variations on a circuit. Jake and I did not get this working until 10 minutes after the lesson had finished, so unfortunately I have no video. This exercise sparked ideas of visual permutations dependent on voltage, which may even crawl into my forum instrument somehow...

Christian Haines. “Forum – Week 6 – Physical Computing.” Workshop presented at the Audio Lab, Level 4, Schultz Building, University of Adelaide, 30th of August 2007.

Sebastian Tomczak. “Forum – Week 6 – Physical Computing.” Workshop presented at the Audio Lab, Level 4, Schultz Building, University of Adelaide, 30th of August 2007.[1]

1. David Dowling "Forum - Week 7 - Physical Computing." Blog entry reference. Online http://www.notesdontmatter.blogspot.com/

Forum - Week 7 - Physical Computing 2

For "physical" computing there sure was a lot of sitting down.

This week we continued our physical computing capers, this time controlling one of our circuit-bend toys using Max. Our circuit bend toy is still the phone, as all subsequent toys we have purchased have not worked. We decided to control the battery terminal connection in the circuit using Max, and of course we ended up plugging a metro into the kslider so that the circuit would turn on and off rapidly (every 50 ms in the video).



Exercise 4 proved to be troublesome, as even though we followed the instructions directly, and under the watchful eye of Seb, it did now work. Every time something doesn't work it doubles the amount of time required, so from now on Jake and I will 1. Follow the instructions. 2. Repeat instructions if necessary. 3. Blog that result. So here is our first 'doesn't work' video. The circuit took a good 15 minutes to set up, so we were a little disappointed when it had no effect on the sound.



Christian Haines. “Forum – Week 7 – Physical Computing (2).” Workshop presented at the Audio Lab, Level 4, Schultz Building, University of Adelaide, 6th of September 2007.[1]

Sebastian Tomczak. “Forum – Week 7 – Physical Computing (2).” Workshop presented at the Audio Lab, Level 4, Schultz Building, University of Adelaide, 6th of September 2007.[1]

1. David Dowling "Forum - Week 7 - Physical Computing 2" Blog entry reference. Online http://www.notesdontmatter.blogspot.com/

CC2 - Week 7 - Sampling II

Continuing with my enjoyment from last week, I have gone all black and white in order to create an old-school granulation synthesiser- just like mama used to make. Those signalmeter~'s are soo retro...



As you can see, I have taken the knowledgeable face of Sigmund "Ol' Dirty Bastard" Freud and used it as a distraction from the rest of the patch. Genius, no? Jake and I used a different object to the prescribed "ranger" one, as this new one actually provides visual reference to the wavetable for range selection. A problem we encountered was envelope placement outside of the poly~ object- it just can't be done successfully. It would work very, very easily if function objects could be sent data straight from other function objects, however this is always unsuccessful. Before you say that it's possible, TRY IT. The function object is an absolute joke, and I hope we don't have to use it for much longer.



A last minute addition was my panning... thingy. As seen below, a random number between 0 and 1 is picked and that number increases the volume of one channel and decreases the other proportionally. Eg. the number 0.80 is picked, so the right channel volume is multiplied by 0.8 and the left channel is multiplied by 0.2. The result of this is pretty good, as each instance in the poly~ has it's own pan value set each time the instance occurs, and the grain plays at this pan position until the grain is finished.



Remember, a Freudian slip is when you say one thing but mean your mother...

Patch and wavetable files
~ZIP 540KB~

Sonic result
~MP3 670KB~

Christian Haines. “Creative Computing Week 7, Sampling II.” Lecture presented at Tutorial Room 408, Level 4, Schultz building, University of Adelaide, 6th of September, 2007.

Forum - Instrument Proposal

Instrument Name: Victoria

My instrument will take concepts created by Will and I earlier in the semester in regards to Victorian Synthesis. The instrument will primarily play itself, however there will be much involvement from the 'musician' to change tempo and component involvement.

The concept is a drum-machine-style conglomeration of rhythmically intertwined Victorian Synths (see Forum Week 1) that would hopefully provide a infectious tempo for the Forum improvisations. The overall size of the instrument is yet to be established, however I aim to fit it in a shoe box or two. As is required for the concept, I will be using copious amounts of aluminium foil, which always looks pretty.

I hope to allow other student's instruments to contaminate the 'circuit', either by running their output sound through my speakers (thus effecting tempo and rhythm) or by including my rhythmic electrical beats into their circuit.

Although it will take some 'hacking' I aim to control volume (and thus tempo) using the Arduino board and Max. What I presume needs to be done it to have the voltage of the circuit controlled by Max, which seems very possible.

I surmise that my instrument will be more aesthetically pleasing than aurally pleasing (what with all of the aluminium foil) which is where coloured lighting comes in - my instrument will act like a mirror ball!

CC2 - Week 6 - Sampling 1

What's this? My OWN work? How wonderful. I have figured out that the weekly Max tasks are a lot less tedious if I try to make them fun, ie. base the whole thing on James Brown (rest in peace).



I created my own samples from James Brown songs (I enjoy creating loops for some reason) and the picture is just from Google images. Another way to make it fun is by not doing the poly~ version, as this doubles the time taken and total tedium in patch creation. I will probably do it eventually, but you know how it is.



I was tentative about putting white sliders in, but brown ones were too hard to see over the red (and I had to have red to match the clothes). Get Funky!

Sonic result
~MP3 885KB~

Patch files
~PAT 1.96MB~

[1] Christian Haines. "Creative Computing: Semester 2, Week 6. Sampling I." Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 30/08/2007.[2]

[2] John Delany. "Creative Computing: Semester 2, Week 6. Sampling I." Blog reference at http://johndelany.blogspot.com/

CC2 - Week 5 - Synthesis (2) - Vibrato, FM and Waveshaping.

The outcomes of FM synthesis seem to be far richer than additive synthesis- the most complex sound can come about so easily, sometimes in under a minute. I look forward to utilising this synthesis technique in my major project. I encountered some issues when trying to incorporate a 'function' envelope into the harmonicity ratio in the help file, as I wanted a choice between either a static value or enveloped. The solution ended up using a combination of gate and gate~, so only one of the controls can be used at a time. I apologise for the lack of interesting interfaces, but as you may have guessed this was all a little last minute.

FM synthesiser

FM synth GUI

FM synth help file

Here is the interesting sonic result.
~MP3 294KB~

And here's the patches.
~PAT 5KB~

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