To be honest, there wasnt as much creativity in this patch as my Poly instrument that I'm super proud of. With that said: This is a Video Effects tool that uses mutiple different forms of modulation. One form is by taking midi note information from ableton; in the example below, you can see a fast flickering occuring. This is the contrast being controlled by midinotes in ableton. It corresponds to music that is also being played but in this example you cant hear the music. it also uses a tempo tool so that on every beat the outline changes colour. There is a bit more to it then just that, But i dont want to go into too much detail talking about this patch, partly because most of the stuff within this patch was just stuff that we covered in class. To create this it kinda felt like playing with instgram filters, so to me it didnt feel like i created something original. It still was really fun to put this together, and i think the skills i learned here are going to be used again for projections to accompany my music in the future.
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In the pictures above you can see a Poly synthesiser that i created in Max MSP. At this stage in its production it has four oscilators, with an adjustable waveform, the three additional oscillators could be switched off, has a course tuning number (red) in semitones and a fine tuning number (yellow) in cents and also has a dial that controls the gain of the individual oscilator. The main issues that i faced with this version of the poly synth was getting the adsr~ object to function correctly. Its important to note that the attack and decay take a whole numer in miliseconds, the sustain takes a decimal from 0 to 1, and the release takes a whole number again in milliseconds. the attack controls how quickly the note reaches full volume after pressing a note. shortening the time for this will make the note reach its peak very abruptly, and lengthening it will allow it to smoothly move to its peak. Decay functions in a similar way, but in reverse and travels down to a percentage of the volume which is set by the sustain. The realease should indicate the time that it take for the sound to move from the sustain value back to nothing again. The issues that i had was getting this tool to function correctly in a poly instrument. I noticed, after applying the adsr~ object that it was only playing notes for a few instances within my poly (like only 3 times out of 12 or something stupid) and i had to dig around to find where the problem was for quite some time. I realized that for some reason, when the bang came through the first time in these instances, it was sending a 1 message, and the second time it was sending a 0 message. I was initially trying to use a toggle tool to activate the envelope and this was part of the problem. i believe the edge~ object was sending a message back up to the toggle and creating a message feedback loop within the circuit. To fix the problem, i created 2 message boxes, one with a 1, one with a 0, and made a delayed bang that was also being modified by the release time. This fixed the problem once and for all and my poly instrument was up and running! In the picture above i had decided to move on to max for live to continue my patch creation. I noticed that most max objects can't be automated from ableton without an ableton object connected to it. so you can see I've added a few nice ableton numberboxes for that purpose. I also got rid of the kslider because i was now getting note information from the midi in ableton live using the notein object.
One of the issues taht i faced was in automating the adsr functions. Within the created live sliders (which all had modified ranges) automating them in ableton ended up overloading my CPU. i think it had something to do with the amount of steps that i was allowing inside these objects. ableton was creating a smooth line, and max was trying to calculate the decimals of that straight line and it was all too much. to fix the problem i made sure that i had 1 extra step then the whole number of the range of the slider (if the range was 250, i needed 251 steps). Problem solved. I wanted to expand a little more on the idea, and i thought it would be really cool if i had a "harmonic calculator" that would automatically calculate a partial from whatever note was being played in the midi. So I created a whole bunch of message boxes with the correct distance from the fundamental (in semitones and cents) linked them all up, and created a subbing in process that allowed me to select an oscilator to send the information to. (i also coloured the presentation message boxes in regards to how they relate to their intervals - octaves are black, fifths/fourths are dark/light blue etc). I found experimenting on this tool really fun and interesting. I've had a fascination with the harmonic series for quite some time, so having the ability to manipulate the timbre of a sound is something that i think I'd like to explore further. |
AuthorMy name is Daniel Ohm and this section will include my research into music theory, experimental ideas, Mixing techniques and lessons learned from creative forums and musical endeavors. Archives
September 2022
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