[PD] Live Apectrum Analyzer

David Powers cyborgk at gmail.com
Fri Feb 2 21:09:57 CET 2007


On 2/2/07, Patco <megalegoland at yahoo.fr> wrote:
> David Powers a écrit :
> A noise is usually a sound that is not elegant enough for being
> considerated in a pretty composition unless it's concrete music, or
> maybe electroacoustic music, from my own point of view.

> > Metasynth and Coagula (a free program that
> > does this on winXP) both make a lot of interesting sounds, of which
> > "noise" would only by one potential.
> They both make interesting sounds indeed, but at the end we don't really
> feel the relation between the image and the sound, it's like taking a
> synth a touching all the buttons until a cool sound comes out.

Well, first, I don't know what a "pretty composition" is, but I guess
in most of the electronic stuff I listen to, the noise ratio is high
(experimental, glitch, minimal techno/house, IDM, free improv). That
includes the electro-acoustic stuff. I guess I take it as a given that
the world generally, and the music world along with it, have become
much noisier in the last 100 years.

Second, if you paint directly in Coagula, it is very easy to
understand the relationship between the visual painting and the sound.
In fact, I have done sound design in it, that would be quite difficult
to do through traditional audio processes, and it can be done very
intuitively and quickly. However, you are basically only dealing with
band limited noise and sine waves in that program. Variable waveforms,
even from wavetables, and perhaps FM, would greatly expand the timbral
possibilities.

Crazy idea along this line: what if you could compose in graphic
"layers" ala Photoshop, with FM occurring where the layers overlap?

~David




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