Name: PP2 (work in progress) by ethi.cc in close in
Duration: 3 min 24 s
Description: A shorter version of PP1. Using mostly the same synthdefs. 'live' recording. A bit of tweaking of panning and levels required.

Nice work. Just today I was thinking about how to the recreate some night music, your is pretty awesome.

close in

performed live by the Micro Modular Ensemble 2011

Slopes

This sound was generated using the following 140 characters of SuperCollider code. I post these at unpredictable intervals at www.twitter.com/headcube.

play{x=Saw.ar(0.7**lag(kr(n=LFNoise0,1/5),2)*[601,500,749]);Splay.ar({|i|x=x+BAllPass.ar(x,9**n.kr(a=1b**i)*2e3)+CombL.ar(x,1,a,8)/2s}!9@8)}

This is the first one for quite a while. I've worked on a few tweets in that time, but I wasn't really happy with most of them. I quite like this one though.

I felt like doing something with synth strings, minor chords, portmanteau and phasor effects. All of those elements made it into the final version. The phasor effect is achieved by adding an all pass filter (in this case BAllPass.ar, from the sc-plugins package) to the original signal, resulting in phase cancellation effects. This is repeated nine times (the "!9" near the end of the code) with a different cutoff frequency, and each time a delay effect is also added. I originally wanted the phasor frequencies to be swept with sine wave LFOs, but in the end (for reasons of the 140-character limit) I had to use a sample-and-hold waveform instead, so each frequency is static most of the time, and occasionally changes to a new random variable. You can hear interesting little clicking sounds when this happens.

This whole effects chain is applied to three separate sawtooth waves, which are slightly detuned from a frequency ratio of 10:12:15, which is a minor chord in just intonation. The root note of the chord is randomly chosen (with no regards to any scale) every five seconds, providing further evidence for my theory that if the sound is right you can just play completely random chords and it sounds good. At the end these three sound channels are panned across the stereo field (the Splay UGen).

As always, the intention here is to make a cool sound in 140 characters just for the sake of it, and this doesn't result in code that's remotely sensible or readable. However, if you do decide to try and understand it anyway, it might help you to know that the "@" notation is a syntax shortcut for getting an element of an array. So a@10 is the same as a[10]. So the "{…}!9@8" in this tweet means "evaluate the previous function 9 times and put the results in an array, and then get element 8 of that array". It's just a different way of writing "9.do{…}", which turned out to be slightly shorter in this case.

Finally, I find it quite satisfying that this tweet contains all the digits from 0 to 9.


SuperCollider tweet from 8.10.2013 (see description for explanation and code)

Score4

Corpi Sonori (Binaural)

This is an early sketch of whistling synthesis made in SuperCollider. The synth definition consists of 68 UGens (RIP Max Matthews), but there is more to come. Need to do some mouth modelling. 

Drunk whistling

A micro-sonic composition made with the SuperCollider programming environment. The piece takes the concept of "swarms" into the sound domain. The behavior of these swarms is stochastically controlled and it's sonic qualities are derived from FM synthesis. The peak points of density were modeled with comb filters. Dedicated to J. Chowning & C. Roads.

Aleatory Swarm (stereo version)

Coltan and cassiterite 1

A work in progress. Developing towards a synthetic sound environment.  A 'live' track using prepared synthdef. 

PP1(work in progress)

A shorter version of PP1. Using mostly the same synthdefs. 'live' recording. A bit of tweaking of panning and levels required. 

PP2 (work in progress)

Fleshwound

Improvised 'nature' sketch using only synthesis in SuperCollider.   

SC 160407 212711

Work in progress. A partial recording of a multichannel work. Entirely synthesised in SuperCollider.

Close

This sound was entirely generated by the following 139 characters of SuperCollider code:

<code> play{f=({|i|DelayC.ar(0-LPF.ar(InFeedback.ar(2+i),2000).tanh,1,1.5**i/4e3)}!6);Splay.ar(f)++(Dust.ar(f*2e4+1)*LFSaw.kr(3/4**(0..5)/8)/5+f)} </code>

I post these at unpredictable intervals on Twitter (@headcube).

Some technical details for the interested: This code creates six feedback delay lines operating in parallel (independently from one another), each approximately a perfect fifth above the last. Some nonlinearity is provided by the tanh function, and they're excited by some noise from the Dust UGen, whose frequency is also modulated by the fed back signal, giving a breathy flute-like sound. The amplitude of the feedback in each delay line is modulated at a different tempo, such that it will never quite repeat. The overall effect vaguely reminds me of Brian Eno's ambient stuff.


PP2 (work in progress)

ethi.cc

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