learning the ropes

Shlomit and I are proposing a final project around visualizing the propagation of sound and exploring the physicality of sound.

One of our ideas is an installation which captures the evolution of sound in a space. Colored lights suspended from the ceiling of the space react to sounds created in the space. We draw our inspiration from the ephemeral quality of warm breath in cold winter air. As you exhale, a gentle fog issues from your lips into the surrounding air.

Other ideas surrounding this first proposal are issues of memory and the incarnational power of words. The words we speak and the words we hear are not mere acoustical vibrations. They carry meaning. What if we could see these vibrations as they occured? What if we could see lingering traces of these vibrations?

Our second idea is an installation where the viewer walks through a field of flexible reeds. As the reeds are pushed aside, pleasant sounds are created in the space.

I spoke with Peter today about the difficulty I was having with the with fftin~ and fftout~ objects in MAX. He suggested I try the fffb~ object instead, which he used in the past to create a real-time frequency analyzer. I’ll give it a try this weekend.

I’m not sure how to react to this reading. I don’t think I’ve listened to minimal music, yet. Perhaps I should try to find some. Composers mentioned in the reading were La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. Perhaps the Avery Fischer Media Collection at Bobst has recordings. It would be even more ideal if there was a place online to listen — and in fact there is. We have access to The Anthology of Recorded Music

I’ll have more to say after I hear some.

I’m working to figure out how to analyze the dominant frequency of an audio signal. This takes me into the world of fft~. In an effort to avoid further reading, I search the MAX/MSP forums for audio to midi conversion.

This yields a patch called fiddle~ which is supposed to follow pitch. The fiddle patch appears to only run on Macintosh… it requires externals.

I return to the MAX/MSP documentation and try to puzzle over fft~. I read the tutorials in chapters 25 and 26. The documentation seems to present a progression. The fft~ object performs basic Fast Fourier Transforms, but doesn’t take into account the overlap (?) of sample bins. I was skimming, so this is all a little unclear. All I’m looking to do is take frequency readings every “n” seconds in order to construct a “melody” out of some recorded speech. The tutorials seem to indicate I’ll need to “window” my samples and that the pfft~ object takes this problem into account. There’s even a diagram of a patch that shows how to read off the current frequency. The problem is, I don’t know how to create an embedded subpatch for pfft~ to use. I try, instead, to create a named subpatch.

This works, but I found that the output I was sending out of the subpatch I create didn’t change at all. Reading the tutorial more closely:

Note that in the above example the number~ object is used for the purposes of demonstration only in this tutorial. When DSP is turned on, the number displayed in the signal number box will not appear to change because the signal number box by default displays the first sample in the signal vector, which in this case will always be 0. To see the center frequency values, you will need to use the capture~ object or record this signal into a buffer~.

I added a capture~ object to the output of my test program, but this didn’t work.

MAX/MSP Patch (.zip)

Quotes:
“Neuhaus aims for a tuning of sound and place as an expanded instrument”
- One of my interests is in the design of musical instruments that are readily playable in improvizational settings with very low barriers to participation.

“… making the experimental strand of musical practice susceptible to a different set of conditions and questions”

“Neuhaus invited an audience or listener to claim the work for him or herself.”

“At that moment [Public Supply I] became a group activity — a process of people making sound together, listening to it, and adjusting what they did according to what was going on. I think this is the heart of the musical process — this dialogue”
- Yes. I tried an improvizational music-making experiment on Tuesday night in my Designing for Constraints class which explored a bit of this idea.

“Concentrating on this field of sound creates a heightened involvement with a given environment, as a means of cartographically locating sounds, their possible sources, and their meanings, not entirely as communicable message, but as an environmental condition”
- Seems to echo Pauline Oliveros’ essay on deep listening. Listening becomes more than just concentrating deeply when experiencing music or sonic art. Perhaps I can make the comparison to an idea regarding drawing I read which related to the creative practices of Leonardo Da Vinci. I have experienced in drawing an understanding of the mechanics of that which I draw. Beyond the artistic composition of a drawing there lies a body of knowledge of the object of the drawing — the way in which that object behaves: response to light, intersections of its components, the dynamics of its motion. The rendering of an object’s image on paper draws upon this understanding. I wonder if the same is not true of sound: something of the structure and mechanics of an object are illuminated through careful listening.

“temporalizing space”

For further research:
Minimalism

I drove up to Dia.Beacon with Alice, Andy, and Rory to hear Max Neuhaus’ Time Peace Beacon. As I entered the building, I felt small — dwarfed by the scale of the building and the ideas contained within it.

I found it interesting how Neuhaus’ piece was able to dialogue with the ambient soundscape of the site without overwhelming it. I felt his sound successfully integrated with the sonic environment, transcended it, and left it different than before I heard it. Just as Peter had described in class, the absence of Neuhaus’ piece once it finished left a space behind.

We created a comical incident while listening for Neuhaus’ work. I became convinced at one point, while we stood in the semi-silence outside the cafe doors at Dia.Beacon, I was hearing a low-pitched throbbing sound. Its regular rhythmic rumble remained at the edge of my perception. I don’t know what I heard, but it wasn’t Neuhaus’ work; after standing outside for 20 minutes, we finally decided to ask the museum attendants at the bookstore what we were supposed to be listening for. The piece plays at seven minutes to each hour and they claimed we would know when it was happening.

Back outside shortly before 3:53pm, we heard a train pass in the distance and wondered during the ensuing silence if we had been fallen for some big joke.

Then, almost imperceptibly, a tone began to emerge from the ambient sounds. I would describe it as a rich, sweet droning. It reminded me of a note sustained on a pipe organ — majestic and vibrating. It was harmonically complex, yet seemingly a single tone. The tone grew in intensity and complexity. It was a beautiful sound, but only fleeting. It ended abruptly and yielded its place back to the existing environment.

I can’t say how, but I felt the environment was changed somehow in those moments after the sound stopped. The sound’s absence left behind a lingering memory and a heightened awareness of what my ears were now hearing. The sounds of the site seemed somehow amplified by the absence of Neuhaus’ work.

What would this work be like if we hadn’t been expecting it at all. Would we have been caught by surprise?

1.
A short blast produced by applying envelopes to both the sound amplitude and to the resonant frequency.
Blast.wav
Blast2.wav
MAX/MSP Patch

2. Although this isn’t strictly noise (in many regards, far from it)… I had the pleasure of listening for a few minutes to a talented performer in the subway.
Come Back to Me

3. For my distortion patch, I took the clean sample from #2, and played it backwards through Peter’s simple distortion patch. CAUTION: this sample is very loud. Turn down your volume before playing.
UnpleasantDistortion1.wav

4.
Here is a sputtering sound I’ve created using envelopes. I started off trying to make a simple beat patch using envelopes, but it started heading more in the direction of a sputtering noise.
sputter.wav
MAX/MSP Patch

Download samples as a package (excluding the field recording).

System 2.wav
System 2 MAX/MSP Patch

Last week, Peter assigned us readings from John Cage and Luigi Rossolo.

Cage’s thoughts on the need for new instruments in “the future of music: credo” parallel Rossolo’s in “The Art of Noise.” Both men anticipated the development of flexible synthesis techniques by which sounds of any character might be constructed. I’m not sure when Russolo wrote “The Art of Noise,” but I imagine it was in the late 1800s. While he didn’t have the technological vocabulary to describe some of the concepts Cage was promoting, he described synthesis in his own way.

I’m personally in favor of a hybrid of these techiques, where recorded sound combines with generated sound.

Cage’s writing style intrigued me. I found I could read his section headings by themselves as a coherent statement or read them as introductions to the body paragraphs. I don’t believe I’ve seen written composition like that before.

I didn’t agree with Russolo’s dismissal of all musical sound as banal. While his interests lay in moving farther and farther away from traditional music and into the complete freedom of pure sound, I continue to be moved by the live performance of music by a human person.

Sample 1: Additive Synthesis
I started playing around with this right after class last week and had it in mind to make some sort of nasty sounding bass patch. I used envelopes to control the frequency and DC offset of the oscillators. I can’t seem to predict, though, how the envelopes actually get used. The way I think it should work is that the metronome kicks off the envelopes and the frequencies I drew should be smoothly sent to the cycle~ object. That’s what happens, except that the full envelope I drew doesn’t get used.

01 – Rumble.wav MAX/MSP Patch

Sample 2: Ring Modulation

Ring Modulation.wav MAX/MSP Patch

Sample 3: FM Fwub Bass
I modified Peter’s FM patch to ramp the modulator amplitude between 20 and 250 over 1 second. This, in combination with the other modulation parameters, yielded a flappy bass sound.

Sample 4: FM Grow Tone
Using the FM synthesis patch again, but this time with different parameters, I created bass tone using a sine wave that evolved with a sound like a resonant filter sweep.

03-FM_Fwub_Bass.wav 04-FM Grow Tone.wav MAX/MSP Patch

Sample 5: Faux Scratch
I discovered an interesting sound by scraping the first modulator frequency between -20 and 20. It made the sound burble a bit and sound almost like a turntablist scratching.

05 Faux Scratch.wav MAX/MSP Patch

Sample 6: Blippy
Blippy, Atari-like noise sample. This one makes use of the modulo function to create the nasty repeating, yet random, blips.

06 Blippy.wav MAX/MSP Patch

Sample 7: Metallic Additive “Feedback”
I took a look in the MAX/MSP documentation folder and looked through the tutorial pages. There are tutorial topics on all of the synthesis techniques we looked at in class along with some helpful patches. I took the additive synthesis patch and started hacking away at it to see what I could produce. The tutorial contains a subpatch called “partial~” which encapsulates some of the basic elements of an oscillator so the patcher doesn’t get so messy. The first patch I created with my modifications uses a fundamental frequency and makes two sets of tone clusters, one of which is subltey randomized. I find that this sounds a bit like feedback in a PA system, but with some interesting pulses caused by the beating of adjacent frequencies.

Sample 8: Metallic Additive Shimmer
One of the presets from the original MAX/MSP tutorial patch sounded interesting when I played it back through my modified version of the patch. I think it sounds a bitter like a metallic shimmer.

07 Metallic Additive Feedback.wav 08 Metallic Additive Shimmer.wav MAX/MSP Patch

Download all samples from this entry.