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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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