[PD] attack/release for spectral gate [was: is this a spectral gate?]

[Kevin McCoy]

Hi Chuck!

Actually I was working on it tonight.  The problem with it is that it
is too harsh and leaves too many artifacts on the signal right now
because the binary [>~] from zexy needs to be smoothed out with
attack/release that persists across different blocks in time.  What I
tried tonight was successive delay lines where the block starts out at
0.25 of its original amplitude, then passes to another delay and is
amplified to 0.5, then to 1, held at 1, down to 0.5, and then to 0.25
and back off.  Successive delay lines that increase and then decrease
were the only way I could think to do this job of smoothing it out
over time and preserve information from past blocks of audio.  I've
attached the patch as I was working on it tonight.

However, this has some problems of its own and I was getting a lot of
high frequencies that I didn't want there, so I think this approach
will need to be windowed as well - the delay lines may need to be
smoothed too, something along the lines of the pitch shifting example
in the documentation, except in the frequency domain??  I dunno and
I'm in a little bit over my head at this point.  It's hard to measure
and assess what you do right and wrong in the frequency domain!
Sometimes a brother just needs a scope.  I am also open to fact that I
am completely wrong about this :)

What you're describing, if I read you correctly, is I think
implemented in the noisegate example in Pd's doc... if they are
different, could you clarify?  but all of these just sound bad to me
and of poor quality, they really need attack and release to sound
convincing/interesting and less "artifact-y" when you really push
them.  I'm all for destruction/mangling of audio, and FFT seems truly
powerful in that regard, but I just don't like these results yet.  Of
course, Tom Erbe's soundhack filters already do this, but he hasn't
responded to this on how he got attack/release to work for him - it
may need to be handled differently in Pd as opposed to whatever he
used to code those VSTs.

That said, I would *love* to hear/try what you come up with.  Let's be
in touch about this!

Kevin


On 3/28/07, Charles Henry <czhenry at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, Kevin,
>   I liked your idea for a spectral gate.  I can see two possible
> applications for it:
> 1.  removing broadband noise from signals
> 2.  masking out one sound from a collection of sounds
>
> And the first option is especially cool.  It would be like a noise
> gate on steroids, because it would remove the noise, even when there's
> a signal present.  If it's alright... I'd like to give it a try, and
> send it to you.
> I'll re-format it so that one signal (noise or whatever) can be
> recorded and then used to mask the same signals out of a continuous
> signal input.  In fact this can be reformatted as a kind of weiner
> filter, which will optimally reconstruct signals in the presence of
> noise.
> Have you gotten this working the way you want yet?
>
> Chuck
>
> On 3/23/07, Kevin McCoy <km.takewithyou at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hello all,
> >
> > A while ago I was working on a spectral gate patch and now I've come
> > back to it.  Here's a quote from Tom Erbe's earlier email:
> >
> > "For a spectral gate, just calculate the amplitude from real and imag,
> > make your gate decision based on the amplitude and threshold, and
> > then apply the same gain reduction to both real and imag. Add attack
> > and release to the gate-gain for smoother results."
> >
> > I want to add the attack and release so it sounds smoother and less
> > bubbly/harsh (know what I mean?)  I am racking my brain trying to
> > figure out how to do this to each of the frequencies.  The soundhack
> > vst does this really nicely and even has a visual representation of
> > the gate where you can see it rise and fall with attack/release for
> > the whole spectrum.
> >
> > The problem for me is persistence across different blocks.  I suspect
> > [line~] doesn't work for this as it does for amplitude attack/release
> > implementations.  For example, if there is a spike around 3000 Hz, how
> > can I carry that attack and release across several blocks of audio?  I
> > used delay objects with what I thought was some success, but I don't
> > think I had it right.  I have attached the patch which is basically
> > what Frank posted earlier - it does not have any of this yet and is
> > just a hard on/off.
> >
> > Much confusion, I would be grateful for any help!
> > Kevin
> > --
> >
> >
> > ++++
> > http://pocketkm.blogspot.com
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
> >
> >
>


-- 


++++
http://pocketkm.blogspot.com
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