Audio Synthesis: Through the Forest
A short audiovisual experiment exploring generative sound design. Using terrestrial lidar scans and Houdini FX to create midi data 🌲🎼
Getting out of music block(?) with this one theme! Shinobi's soundtracks in general are great, and this one in particular was both challenging and fun to remake.
I unfortunately don’t really have much of a write up about this - I recorded it quickly after work and tore down the patch shortly after, and so have no exact signal flow or pretty gif to show for it (I found some “B roll” though!)
Chord wash from the tELHARMONIC (now through Ikarie & Yester Versio) is getting closer to the sound I’m trying to get out of it. Slowly but surely learning.
The lead is Ts-L’s stepped sine/PWM voice. Glitching is created with Data Bender, but also by sending out of sync stepped modulation to the PWM input causing the wave to jump around some.
I’ve really streamlined my recording setup, so I’m hoping to throw things up with even higher frequency. The way I see it, if I jam, I should have something to show from that session.
We are proud to announce the second album of it's kind.
Modular Mayhem II is a journey into modular synthesis with a wide variety of colourful and sonic soundscapes and patches.
This album took a lot of time to make, and we made it with a lot of love.
The album is completely Tri-Phase ready as it contains beautiful stereo patterns, also known as lissajous patterns, which is a beautiful sight to behold on an oscilloscope.
Listening with headphones or a good stereo setup is a highly recommended.
Gee wilikers, Linux reinvented their audio subsystems again, and now I gotta learn how PipeWire works.
At least it's better documented than PulseAudio. Getting JACK and PulseAudio to play well together was frustrating. PipeWire for the most part "just works" (since it's mostly a drop-in replacement).
On my realtime audio synthesis laptop (running Debian), I still just masked everything PipeWire and used JACK, though, because I didn't want to mess with too much of what I know. Yet. Maybe I'll make an effort when pipewire-0.3.65 becomes pipewire-1.0.0.
Still, I definitely missed having a realtime audio computer 🥰
Final piece of the drum case (for now) is here, from a pre-order a while ago: Xodes ABD (Acid Bass Drum). This patch happily takes it into the Rook/IDUM ecosystem to free up Taiko/Daiko for more novel percussion.
Melodic atmosphere is Softpop 2 processed by Korg’s Nu:Tekt. Nothing too special, just quantized randomness with a pleasing voice.
Nothing “too special” today, but it’s just nice to try to play a little something every day. I was listening to this patch for so long just in the background, going back to re-record a couple of times before finding a take I liked. I hope to find ways to keep adding progression to the drums, especially by modulating Rook’s length and shift params which I end to do manually right now, and bring both cases together for more fully fleshed out pieces.