AA2 - Week 11 - Soundtracks

CC2 - Week 11 - Panning

I'm not sure exactly how we're supposed to hand up a recording of a four-channel patch. I guess I could record the front and the back as separate stereo files, but I'm running out of online credit both at home and at uni.



I originally tried to implement multi-channel panning in my granular synthesis patch, but I could not get it to run below 85% CPU to it kept chugging. I thus created an new patch, which allows you to run a stereo signal (or two entirely different signals) into it and pan each one within a quad speaker set up. You can also throw the sound to a random position, and even allow each channel to be continuously moved around the sound field in an entirely random manner. This was simple, the hard part was my implementation of "cat and mouse" and "opposing" reactive panning.



First, cat and mouse. Wherever signal 1 is positioned, signal 2 will go. How quickly signal 2 reacts is determined by the user, meaning you can set signal 1 to randomly move around, while signal 2 'chases' it. Moving on, opposing reactive panning means that wherever signal 1 is positioned, signal two is as far opposite as it can get, eg. sig 1 is in the front left speaker, sig 2 will be in the rear right. This works particularly well with a stereo sound file, as the stereo field is constantly moving, while sounds that are centred in the file remain relatively still.

Feel free to plug your own sounds into the patch, and it works very well as a bPatcher.

~PAT 9KB~

CC2 - Week 10 - Delay

Nothing like a fresh pot of delay in the morning. This was relatively simple, as the tapin~ and tapout~ objects are logical and easy to implement. In fact most of my time was spent on the interface, and creating perfect Pink Floyd loops. Speaking of loops, I made a humorous little sample mixer this week, which is included in this patch. Slide the "Song mix" slider right or left to mix between the wavetables.



~MP3 1.9MB~
~ZIP 2.29MB~
Sorry 'bout the big size, but them stereo wav's be big buggers.

AA2 - Week 10 - Ambience

She has beautiful 'eyes'...

CC2 - Week 9 - Processing - FFT

I did it. Did what? IT, motherlover. It took 3 hours of tutorial reading (which was like chewing on broken glass), then a further 7 hours of hardcore Max mania, and what do I have to show for it? Every grain in my granular synth patch can now be manipulated with its own phase vocoder. HORRIBLE trying to implement it, rather interesting results. Now there is a additional control for 'grain stretching', which takes each grain and (surprise!) stretches it for any amount of time you so wish. I plan to have this control automated by the next incarnation, so each grain is not only randomly selected from within a range, but has an individual length from quick to ultra slow. This will undoubtedly be used in my project, and I plan to use granular synthesis as one of the main... things.

Getting all the numbers into
the pfft~ in the poly~... Ugh.

The most difficult things... can wait until I have more time to list them all.

Other things to do:
Change the visual aesthetic - totally over it.
Fix the buzz that occurs on grain 0.
Find the comfortable limits of use - and place limits there.
Use better sounds.

Interior of pfft~, with buffer/record/index namer.
Names each grain's recorded sample.

I will attach the zip of the files, however the controls are not fully integrated into the patch and most of them don't have loadmess' to initiate them. I'll fix this too, but I have stuff due on Monday that I haven't started. The file you want is bkp.grain.vocode.pat. If you can't be bothered figuring it out, here's an MP3 I made of it in full swing. Note the size ~MP3 2.75MB~

~ZIP 766KB~

AA2 - Week 9 - Game Audio Design (1) - Assets

This week we were asked to create 4 sound assets for our chosen game, so fingers crossed our preproductions go through. I decided to make sounds for a health pickup, a gun being shot, a voice over (TRIPLE KILL!!!) and the sound of a jumppad. The associated articles were somewhat helpful, however as Christian informed us they were pretty simple, and I did not really learn anything new, just reestablished prior knowledge. An issue that has come about is that I don't think my game has inbuilt reverb or other environmental effects, meaning such effects will need to be included within each of my assets. More in depth descriptions about the processes I used are detailed in the asset.xls within the attached zip file.

The gun I chose to create the sound for was the "Crylink", as this had by far the most uninspiring sound effect in the game. Originally it sounded like somebody flushing a miniature toilet, so I hoped to give it a bit more of a punch by using watery sounds mixed with real gun sounds.

Crylink

I also made the sound for a medium health pickup, which was a bit more complicated than I expected. Considering there is nothing even remotely similar to a health pickup in the real world, imagining the sound was difficult. In a way I guess it should have been easier because I was free to use any sound and it wouldn't technically be 'wrong', however I wanted a sound that the player would look forward to hearing, making the health pickups all the more enticing. I ended up settling for an unobtrusive reversed bongo arrangement, which has quite a happy sound to it.

Medium Health

For the voice asset I recorded myself saying "Triple Kill", used in the game when a player kills three other players within quick succession. This was more 'same old' for me- with all the voice over stuff I've done this year I'm beginning to run out of voices. I was either going to have a female voice (done by a girl of course, although my falsetto does sound a little feminine) or my cliche SuperMegaTestosterone Man voice. For last-minute-rush purposes I used my own voice. I might start listening to women a little more discerningly, keeping an ear out for a good voice. I think her voice would need to be feminine but still strong and authoritative, kind of like "I'll slap you to death if you look at me again".

The last sound I made was for the jumppad, which is used in the game to jump twice as high as normal. It was a simple combination of a click, clunk & whoosh; the sounds of which came from the deadroom door and white noise.

~ZIP 123KB~