Shine On

The coveted first position on my blog goes to Audio Arts where reverb is intended to emulate the size of the room that the sound is sourced from. Reverb is a tool to colour and bring life to recorded music. Vocals including backing, drums and keyboards as well are the prime contenders for reverb enhancement. Reverb is not intended to clutter the mix, but bring it to life. Pre-Delay is an important parameter, which is the time between the sound and the reverb kicking in. A gated reverb is the usual type of reverb used on a drum kit, so that would be a useful plug-in addition to the current ProTools setup.

Due to the inclusion of code examples, Creative Computing will take the last place this week, but in forthcoming weeks may indeed take first place. The code would have to be rather special. However, forum had the music of Christian Marclay and Pink Floyd played. Marclay is a turntable specialist and the way he scratched work by different artists together is impressive. The work involving Jimi Hendrix's work was a highlight, because there was times of momentary recognition, but most of the time, the turntabling took much of the semblance away. Again, I enjoyed listening to Pink Floyd. This time it was the 'concept' album 'Wish You Were Here', which was released in 1975. Incidentally, that was the same year Eno released 'Another Green World'. I enjoyed 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond' in its 9 parts, and heard a couple of interesting production techniques in the work, but perceived little else related to Music Technology.

Some interesting presentations of honours projects were given, and they were given by honours students. Seb Tomczak's DIY physical interfaces should produce a fascinating and hopefully practical outcome, whilst it appears Darren Curtis is pursuing a field - Frequency Medicine - that may consume him for a significant number of years. An example of this 'medicine' is the study of Binaural Beat Frequencies.

So far my success with SuperCollider iteration techniques has been limited. I have struggled with the 'do' command and the concept of returning a function. However, I've pressed on to using 'P' functions. These appear to be a fairly simple way of sequence. My first example takes my AM synthdef, which is now a stereo L and R synthdef, and puts it in the class Pbind. In this example, I have also used a Pfunc to randomly change the carrier frequency (which is an argument of the AM synth). The sound quickly becomes hideous so I will only present the code.

(
//AM Synth
SynthDef(
\synthAM,

{
//Arguments
arg     carrierFreq    = 220,
carrierVol    = 1;

//Variables
var    carrier,
modulator;

//UGens
modulator    = SinOsc.kr(
freq:    220,
phase:    0,
mul:        1
);
carrier    = SinOsc.ar(
freq:    carrierFreq,
phase:    0,
mul:        [carrierVol * modulator, carrierVol * modulator]
);

//Output
Out.ar([0,2], carrier)
}
).load(s);
)
(
Pbind(
\instrument, "synthAM",
\carrierFreq, Pfunc({rrand(50, 500)})).play
)

Naming of code and in particular of synthdefs is going to become an issue. For example, as soon as my AM synth has the code changed by a UGen like an impulse.ar, it is no longer an AM synth and a name has to be determined and applied.

(
//AM Synth (not)
SynthDef(
\notsynthAM,

{
//Arguments
arg     carrierFreq    = 220,
carrierVol    = 1;

//Variables
var    carrier,
modulator,
something;
//UGens
modulator    = SinOsc.kr(
freq:    220,
phase:    0,
mul:        1
);
carrier    = SinOsc.ar(
freq:    carrierFreq,
phase:    0,
mul:        [carrierVol * modulator, carrierVol * modulator]
);

something    = Impulse.ar( [carrierFreq, carrier]);
//Output
Out.ar(0, something)
}
).load(s);
)
(
Pbind(
\instrument, "notsynthAM",
\carrierFreq, Pfunc({rrand(50, 500)})).play
)

REFERENCES:
Grice, David. 2006. Reverb. Tutorial presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, 9 May.

Haines, Christian. 2006. SuperCollider (6). Tutorial presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, 11 May.

Harris, David. 2006. Listening (7). Workshop presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 11 May.

Tomczak, Seb and Curtis, Darren. 2006. Honours Presentations. Presentations presented at the Electronic Music Unit, EMU Space, University of Adelaide, 11 May.

Dimery, Robert, ed. 2005. 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. Sydney: ABC Books.

Albums that made this blog possible:
'Happy Trails' by Quicksilver Messenger Service