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Re: [microsound] Using PD for microsound (newbie)
Hi David,
David Powers wrote:
What I'm wondering is, conceptually, what kinds of patches have people designed using PD?
Frank Barknecht's RRADical patches, Roads' "Microsound" book and my
Particle Chamber patch are all good places to start looking, as Frank
and Charles both noted.
I usually start my workshops by showing the big white blank of the PD
interface, and then explaining that alhough you can run part of a
webserver, do a VJ set or make your own version of Reason with the exact
same software, the best part is that the interface doesn't tell you to
do any of that. You really have to bring your own ideas, and your
knowledge about how to execute those ideas, to PD or else it won't do
anything for you at all.
For any kind of performance patch, there's a few areas to concentrate
on, and these are the things I think about for all my work in PD:
1) Live signal processing: take sound from the soundcard or another
sound app in realtime and do something to it. Something like building
your own VST plugins. Many effects are possible from the creative
application of time delay: echoes, reverb, phasing, comb-filtering,
pitch-shifting, granulation, etc etc. The rest are mostly done with
filter algorithms (themselves sometimes based on delays). Understanding
not only how those effects work in the analog world, but also how the
computer actually handles sound (as samples) is essential to building
any kind of Digital Sound Processing effects. Look at Roads' "Computer
Music Tutorial" or Charles Dodge's "Computer Music" for basic computer
audio know-how. The Roads book is for math nerds, the Dodge book is not ;-)
2) Static soundfile processing: take a soundfile from the harddrive and
do something to it, a sampler or loop-player being the most primitive
example. My Particle Chamber patch takes a soundfile and granulates it,
with an XY table to determine what part of the soundfile is being
chopped up and how fast or slow the files gest "scanned" through.
(Incidentally, this is the exact same method Live uses to time-synch all
the loops you put in it, but the granulation is hidden from the user).
Much of what you can do with static soundfiles can also be done with
realtime delay lines. Essentially, all you are doing is locating various
points within a table, and telling PD to start and stop playback at
those various points.
3) Events over time: this is another way of talking about such things as
sequencers and envelope generators--they are simply a description of an
event over a duration (i.e. play a note, start a loop, turn the volume
up and down, change the pitch, lengthen the delay...). There's an
interesting thread about sequencers on the PD list right now, with
people discussing everything from the traditional piano roll and bar
staff to using data structures. Generative or algorithmic event creation
also falls into this area, i.e. things like neural networks and so on.
My patches generally combine all three of these things, and I find that
the most challenging part is the last one. Making and using one effect
in PD does not constitute a "performance" (a filter sweep does not a
techno track make). Finding creative ways of controlling that one effect
brings you a lot closer to making art with it.
good luck!
derek
--
derek holzer ::: http://www.umatic.nl
---Oblique Strategy # 189:
"You are an engineer"
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