modularalien

[modularalien]

SMURFDAY PUDDING TIME!

West Coast inspired fun with the 4MS Spectral Multiband Resonator among other things.

[modularalien]

This is a recording taken of my first patch incorporating my recently aquired Plog from Intellijel. Plog is a dual boolean logic processor also incorporating a toggle and data flip-flop. Gates and/or triggers (or any CV really!) are combined to create interesting gate/trigger patterns according to the boolean truth tables.

I can’t remember the exact patch detail upon writing this, but the gist of this patch takes several clocks from the 4MS Quad clock distributor running at different divisions combined with the random gate bursts taken from the Wogglebug. The Logic outputs are sent to trigger the kick coming from Ripples and the PEG red envelope to trigger the Borg as a LPG. The toggle flip-flop when high sustains the PEG blue envelope controlling the uVCA opening and closing the noise dynamically with the LPG pings. The noise is generated with the Morphing Terrarium with self feedback FM, with wavetable modulation altering the noise colour.

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Recent live recording performed entirely on my eurorack system.

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This short video shows how you can implent basic chord progressions using the 4MS SMRF. Here I’m using René as a stored voltage source and trigger each step manually. The voltage is sent to the SMRF’s Scale CV input, so each step on Rene’ can be tuned to trigger a different scale, which equates to a different chord shape on the SMRF. It sounds particularly nice when some additional modulation is routed to the rotation of the bands on the SMRF, although that isn’t happening in the video. Modulating the spread of the bands is also something that would be effective.

While it’s certainly not as immediate as knowing and being able to play chord shapes on a traditional piano/keyboard, it shows how you can overcome the issue of playing chords on modular which are often monophonic systems. With a bit of forethought and savvy patching, chords and progressions can be easily achieved with the SMRF. 

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Repost taken from my uni journal blog.

Chion & Modes Of Listening

I’ve made reference throughout these posts to different modes of listening that a person can invoke or draw upon. These modes can be very useful in attaining the ability to reveal and analyse qualities of sound that may not be obvious upon first hearing or listening, and shed light some light on different contexts for the use of sounds. The way in which we listen to and hear sounds greatly impacts on our interpretation of the underlying meaning or information carried through sounds to our brain. As an electronic based musician, I feel it’s an even more important aspect of composing music to consider, opposed to traditional forms of instrumentation. This is largely due to the freedoms and spectral scope that electronic based music affords the composer to work with. Many sounds used throughout electroacoustic music and acousmatic sound works have been derived from the composer having used a different mode of listening while composing and many of the sonic qualities these sounds can’t be achieved, invoked or represented through means of traditional notation. Being able to listen carefully becomes an imperative quality for the electronic musician.

Michel Chion has described three different modes of listening that each address different objectives. The three modes are causal listening, semantic listening and reduced listening. Causal listening is by far the most common mode employed by everyone with the ability to hear sound and is used as a means to identify the cause or source of a sound. If we’re able to visually identify the cause of a sound then the sound provides us with more information about that object, or if we can’t see the source, then the sound becomes the central source of information regarding the object. So our own experience and knowledge is influential, making causal listening both easily influenced and deceptive. Denis Smalley wrote of another mode of listening he referred to as ‘technological listening’, where the listener associates the percieved sound with the technology of the object producing the sound, but this ultimately boils down to causal listening.

Semantic listening is a mode where meaning is derived from sounds that aren’t actual acoustical properties of the sound itself ie: spoken language, linguistics and codes. It is remarkably complex and is therefore a basis for much of the study done in the field of linguistics. It is interesting that this mode tends to allow us to overlook differences in timbre or pronunciation with language to understand the sound. The modes of causal and semantic listening can and often are used simultaneously. For example we will identify a friend’s voice through their vocal qualities (causal) and interpret what they are actually saying (semantic).

The third mode of listening is reduced listening and is by far the hardest to utilise. The term given to this mode of listening was first coined by concréte pioneer Pierre Schaeffer and is used to focus on the sonic qualities of the sound itself outside the cause or the underlying semantics. Reduced listening causes the sound itself to be the object being observed. Trying to describe or define a sound beyond it’s cause or meaning really highlights how ambiguous our language becomes, it’s incredibly hard to do and feels unnatural. It is almost impossible to define a sound in this context upon a single hearing, so reduced listening involves repeated listening and therefore relies upon a medium of reproducible or recorded sound. That said nearly everyone employs reduced listening techniques in some rudimentary form or another, identifying pitches or intervals between tones. It is a very useful approach for electronic musicians and sound designers working on film/television as it allows sounds a new purpose, meaning that a sound could represent an action or object that is completely unassociated with the actual cause or meaning of the sound itself. Reduced listening also presents positive advantages in opening our minds and ears and sharpening our listening abilities. 

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Just realised that I hadn’t written about this project of mine here, so thought I better make a post sharing this video and a few thoughts.

I sort of put this project on the backburner for a bit and not a lot has changed with the patch since this video was made back in July, but it’s prompted me to go back over it and think about a few ways of improving the patch, though I fell it’s pretty close to where my inital idea was to take it, without further building and implementing this as a part of a larger instrument/synth.

As said in the video, it’s more or less an oscillator patch heavily inspired by the Verbos Electronics Harmonic Oscillator Eurorack and Buchla format modules with a few unique ideas. So it really takes an additive approach at it’s core with a bank of eight sine waves, the first being the fundamental with the rest tuned to proceed through the harmonic series. The amplitude levels of each harmonic can be adjusted independantly allowing for a range of different organ like timbres.

Where it gets interesting though is that each harmonic gets it’s own wavefolder, where higher order harmonics and distortions can be generated through folding the simple sines back in on themselves. There is an oscilloscope implemented for each harmonic so that the wavefolding can be visualised. There are two outputs running from the sine bank which can be balanced with a crossfader. One of these is simply the summed output of all the harmonics, but the other is the output from what’s called the harmonic scanner. This allows crossfading between the eight harmonics and when modulated with the incorporated LFO, makes for nice shifting harmonic and melodic effects. The master output also has it’s own oscilloscope where the signal is plotted on both x and y axis.

Again I’d also like to thank both Randy Jones and Roman Thilenius for their help and design contributions with some of the more tricky aspects.

You can grab the patch here. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/48260608/Harmonic%20Osc.rar

[modularalien]

Technology Shaping Composition & Performance

Much of my recent research has been into areas of how technological developments have impacted on modern arts and society as a whole, looking into the advancements in music technology in particular. As the bulk of my own work and practice relies so heavily on a lot of these technologies it has been interesting to look back and reflect on just how profound some these changes and their consequential impacts have been.

So initially the introduction of recording technology around the turn of the twentieth century smashed the paradigm at that time of having to be in the same space as a musician to witness and experience the performance. It was also responsible for changing the way music was shared and distributed amongst people where the only means of recording music until that point was via traditional notation and score.

These developments eventually led to some of the artists of the Futurist movement, notably Luigi Russolo to explore new experimental and avant-garde forms of music, using his own mechanical inventions and incorporating  the use of noise, complex timbres, microtonality and textures previously unheard in musical compositions. Russolo went on to become a true pioneer and iconic historical figure of experimental forms of music. Thomas Edison practically established the modern capatalist music paradigm, not only through his invention of the recording mediums but through his signing of artists for recordings, giving rise to the consumer culture surrounding music as we now know it. I feel he should be more widely acknowledged for these achievements opposed, to his other controversial and dubious achievements he is widely regarded for.

The recording mediums would later lead other avant-garde movements to establish new forms of composition using the recordings as a source for sound, sound generation and performance. The coinciding technological developments in electrical engineering, computers and digital technology have also provided artists and musicians with even more profound and groundbreaking ways to compose, create and perform music. Synthesizers, computers and digital signal processing devices empower the composer and modern musician with a means to create almost any sound imaginable. The challenge for artists still however lie in creatively using these technologies and not falling into the trap of getting lazy and relying on the tropes they easily facilitate.

It will be interesting to see where the future takes us in terms of recording and peoples expectations on musical performance. We see that fairly recent digital recording developments have basically reduced recorded music to being worthless, through the reproducing of music at virtually no cost without any degradation combined with widespread ease of file sharing over the internet, makes one wonder how a label can survive in the current climate. Technology has provided the tools and means to compose high quality works cheaply and easily available for almost anyone with a laptop and an internet connection. This has led to to greater numbers of people creating music, but has also opened the floodgates of mediocre artists, where it would have been out of reach financially in the past. That’s not to say that bad music wasn’t being released in the past either.

I think we’re now seeing the recording industry turn full circle with many artists only being able to support themselves through touring and live performance, people being so inundated with recorded music that they are placing value back on the experience of musical performance. Oddly though performances themselves have become imitations of studio recordings, completely at odds with the initial aims of recordings as a means to capture a live performance. I feel that this however is just a trend that will likely change again and soon I think, technology providing performers with novel ways to perform their music, reviving the performance as an experience that can’t be recorded. Perhaps though I’m just trying to be optimistic.  

[modularalien]

Spectral Meditation Pt.2

This is a live recording captured with my tascam DR-07, an aleatoric (chance based) generative patch with my eurorack system. The bass comes from the Verbos Complex Oscillator sequenced with with SQ-1. The modulation oscillator is varying the timbre. The principle oscillator is also multed into the Spectral Multiband Resonator emphasizing some of the harmonics to build subtle and shifting chord like pads.

The main melodic lines come from the Morphing Terrarium with pitch sequences from René. There is also some manual adjustment of the sequence direction through the piece. The PEG is controlling the note envelopes triggered with the Quad Clock Distributor with trigger rate modulated with a carefully tuned Wogglebug. The E350 signal is also fed through the Disting running as a delay with the QCD also clocking the delay times. Maths is providing modulation over the envelope speeds and shape and attenuation of the modulation signals varying the QCD rates for the delay and envelopes.

[modularalien]

Today’s WIP patch. The Borg’s tuning and triggers have been fixed!

[modularalien]

Hi all, it’s been quite sometime since I’ve made a post with some patches to share. I’ve been getting back to the nord modular this week after kind of neglecting it for sometime due to my interest in eurorack. I’m really enjoying the complex patching capabilities it offers, finding it complements my modest analogue system nicely.

There are a couple of patches at play in this short recording all entirely generated with the NM. As you can read in the soundcloud description, I’ve been exploring ideas of processing the signal in the feedback path of some karplus-strong patches which has yields some interesting and quite unnatural sounds. I’m  really liking the results of processing the signal bit-crushing and modulating the phaser module’s frequency at audio rates. It produces some lovely textural drones with a distinctly digital flavour.

I’ve also layered a patch where several kicks are sequenced in a psuedo random fashion through processing the triggers with Boolean logic modules and work-around multiplexor made up of several x-fade modules chained together. The final outputs have also been processed with Eventide and Lexicon reverbs.

Patches:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/48260608/karplus%20adv.pch

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/48260608/Monster%20Kicks.pch

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SPACEBOAT 2015

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More On The Run Fun...

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Madrona Labs' Kaivo

I recorded this little video as basic kind of introduction to Madrona Labs' more recent offering - Kaivo.

I've been pretty excited and enthusiastic about this instrument since Randy released it in early 2014, mainly because it's really unique and at this point it occupies it's own little space amongst the vast sea software instruments. In short, it's based on an interesting combination of granular sampling and physical modelling packed into a tight semi-modular package. The GUI is strikingly similar to Aalto which is somewhat comforting to those already familiar with this.

The video basically explains most of functionality of the components, and demonstrates some of the sonic territory the instrument lends itself to. The physical models produce remarkably natural sounds, but the modulation possibilities expand and push these sounds into new and experimental contexts and directions. If you're just wanting tried and tested kinds of timbres, it may not be your cup of tea, but those that are a little more sonically adventurous and enjoy challenging sounds, it's a fun and rewarding tool. The amazing sound quality comes at a cost though, and has a pretty hefty hit on the cpu, is some pretty complex math going on under the hood in relation to the physical models. It's not based on IR's or sampling in that regard.

I'll be posting some patches soon but in the meantime check out the video and you'll see what I mean. 

[modularalien]

This is a short demo exploring my recently aquired Metasonix R-54 VCO/VCF. The erratic, unstable and unpredictable qualities the tube based design imparts are some of the main reasons I like this module, alongside it's distinctive tone, it really sounds like nothing else.

The module has been patched into and key-tracked with my MS-20 mini as they're both scaled to the Hz/volt protocol. Even so the tuning of the R-54 here is still off, so I may end up obtaining the R-60 to achieve equal tempered tuning later on. In this case I wasn't concerned with the tuning, opting to explore the natural sonic qualities and noises the oscillator provides. There is also some pitch modulation coming from the 4MS pingable envelope generator and some post processing coming from Echoboy and Lexicon's Room reverb for some added depth.

[modularalien]

Covert Interference - (u-he Bazille)

Bazille is also amongst my favourite software synthesizers, I like that it's modular, but much like Aalto the limited modules provide a surprising amount of depth and flexibility given a bit of calculated and resourceful patching techniques. This instrument covers a vast range of sonic territory through it's delcious oscillators and the sound quality of the instrument also speaks for itself. Quite simply, It is the best sounding FM/PD synth I've heard to date. There are a couple of patches I designed contained in the competition folders somewhere, which now ship with the instrument.

I designed this patch a bit more recently and can work as a background pad or an atmospheric type of lead depending on the context. I've been exploring bit-rate reduction through the use of the sample-&-hold module which Bazille does quite nicely, sounding even better than some analogue modular systems I've worked with using the same technique. There's also some complex FM happening, leading to some filthy aliasing and distortion, all intentional mind you. So the overall qualities of this patch are the crackling and thick dense distorted nature of the timbre, giving the impression the sound is coming from a broken speaker/sound system. When drenched with the lovely spring reverb provided it sounds great.

Download:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/48260608/Covert%20Interference.h2p

[modularalien]

Hirajoshi Delight (Aalto)

Here's a fresh patch I've been playing around with for Aalto. This one is quite fun and expressive, Velocity has been patched to modulate a few parameters including the Env.1 decay which is chained to Env.2's repeat duration and depth. There's some Karplus-Strong inspired stuff going on with the waveguide, creating some natural pluck timbres which drone on again depending upon velocity. The low-pass gate also gives the timbre a nice rounded percussive character. The modwheel controls modulation of the waveguide and filter cutoff, creating some complex and otherworldly background elements. Finally the overall tuning is scaled to the Japanese Hirajoshi temperament, for a nice eastern flavour.

Patch Code:

<Aalto pluginVersion="66816" presetName="Teez/Hirajoshi Delight" scaleName="Japanese/hirajoshi.scl" key_voices="3" seq_loop="0" seq_retrig="1" seq_rate="0.42300000786781311" seq_rate_p="1.0399998426437378" seq_pulse_delay="0.5" seq_value1="0.070000000298023224" seq_value2="0.12999999523162842" seq_value3="0.19999998807907104" seq_value4="0.26999998092651367" seq_value5="0.32999998331069946" seq_value6="0.39999997615814209" seq_value7="0.4699999988079071" seq_value8="0.52999997138977051" seq_value9="0.59999996423721313" seq_value10="0.66999995708465576" seq_value11="0.72999995946884155" seq_value12="0.79999995231628418" seq_value13="0.87000000476837158" seq_value14="0.93000000715255737" seq_value15="1" seq_pulse0="1" lfo_freq="0.049999997019767761" lfo_level="0.14999999105930328" lfo_level_p="1.7199999094009399" env1_decay="0.31999999284744263" env1_sustain="0.17000000178813934" env1_release="4.369999885559082" env1_decay_p="-0.54000002145767212" env2_repeat="5.8296875953674316" env2_xenv1="2" env2_repeat_p="3.9999997615814209" osc_ratio="3" osc_index="1.6499999761581421" osc_timbre="0.56000000238418579" osc_pitch="110" osc_ratio_p="3.2799997329711914" osc_offset_p="112" osc_index_p="2.9999997615814209" osc_timbre_p="-0.36000001430511475" osc_waveshape_p="0.3399999737739563" osc_mod_out="0.42999997735023499" gate_mode="1" gate_decay="2" delay_input="1" delay_peakfreq="3313" delay_drive="0.17000000178813934" delay_peakres="-3" delay_feedback="0.38999998569488525" delay_freq="55" delay_freq_p="-1.7200000286102295" filter_cutoff="70" filter_q="0.65999996662139893" filter_mix="-0.15999901294708252" filter_cutoff_p="2.5199997425079346" filter_mix_p="-0.020000021904706955" output_reverb="0.18999999761581421" output_reverb_p="0.53999996185302734" patcher_input_1="0000000000000000100000000100000" patcher_input_2="0000001000000010000100000000000" patcher_input_3="1000000000000000000000000000000" patcher_input_5="0000000000000000000000000110000" patcher_input_8="0000000000000000000000000000010" patcher_input_9="0000000000000000000100000000000" patcher_input_10="0000000000000000001000000000000" patcher_input_11="0000000000000000000000000010000" patcher_input_12="0000000000000000000000000100000" patcher_input_13="0001000010000000000100000000000" patcher_input_14="0000000000000000000000000110000" editor_x="0" editor_y="27" editor_width="1134" editor_height="776" editor_num="1" editor_anim="1"/>