Sounds of 2012

An auto-panner, written in javascript.

Playing with Ableton's Tension synth.

Experimenting with sidechain compression.

Messing around with an 808 kit in Ableton.

More playing with slice-to-midi.

Playing with Ableton's slice-to-midi again.

A distortion filter using exponents - we take Math.pow(x, p*2) where x is the sample and p is a parameter.

Back to the resonant low-pass filter, but now with the cutoff frequency controlled by a sine wave. The frequency of the sine wave is a parameter. It sounds great when you're not changing that parameter, but awful when you are - I need to figure out how to fix that.

This is the same filter as on Monday, but the audio is preprocessed - we run it through sin(x*pi/2). I think this is adding some distortion - perhaps increasing the high-frequency content? Anyway whatever it does makes the filter sound more aggressive, which is kinda cool.

Took yesterday's effect, added a delay line to it, and mixed it with the dry signal.

A nice resonant low-pass filter in javascript.

One of my favorite sounds: Zoe babbling just after she wakes up after a nap :)

A randomized repeater, in javascript, with a single parameter controlling the amount of randomness. Here it's ramping from minimum to maximum randomness.

A little echo with parameterisable feedback, written in javascript.

A little more polish on the track I was working on last week.

Same effect as yesterday, but with (linear) interpolation of the sample buffer. No more clicking noises :)

A dead-simple (but flawed) flanger in javascript. A flanger is just what you get when you mix the dry signal with the output of a simple delay line, where the length of the delay is variable. I'm not doing any interpolation, which I think it the cause of the crackling noise. Will try refining that tomorrow...

A dead-simple variable distortion effect in javascript. Simply clips at a level that can be parameterized and automated.

A very simple variable bit-depth reducer, written in javascript.

A simple 1-pole low-pass filter I wrote in javascript. It's not very resonant, so the effect is subtle, but I'm impressed with how smoothly it responds to automation, and how little cpu it uses.

A few more fine-touches. I like it :)

Expanding on yesterday's playtime. You know, I quite like this actually!

More fun in Ableton, mostly using slice-to-midi again.

I am addicted to slice-to-midi. It is so much fun :)

More playing with slice-to-midi. Not as good as yesterday's, but still a lot of fun.

Ableton's slice-to-midi is insanely fun to play with.

A much more gentle version of the effect I've been playing around with. This one sweeps the since wave frequency from 10Hz to 20Hz, and has no artifacts, which makes me even more certain the artifacts came from aliasing.

Ableton's slice-to-midi makes it fantasticly easy to push around bits and pieces of existing audio into something completely new.

A bit of a cheat: I reimplemented yesterday's effect from scratch (this time all in c++) to see if I might have made a mistake somewhere (I'd already tried cubic interpolation - it doesn't help). The rewrite didn't solve anything. Now I'm becoming convinced the nasty noise is due to aliasing. I'll ask some dsp people if there's anything I can do about that.

Same effect as yesterday, but using cosine interpolation on the sine wave frequency. It doesn't sound good - just recording it here for posterity. I'll try cubic interpolation next...

Multiplying by a sine wave that slowly sweeps from 440Hz to 880Hz. I'm pretty sure the nasty clicking noises are due to me not smoothly adjusting the sine wave frequency - due to the way I implemented this, it's stepping every 400 or so samples. I'll give it another try...

Playing with Ableton's vocoder.

Using Ableton's 'Operator' synth to emulate a 303 and make some late-80s style acid techno.

Same as yesterday, but without the echo at all - now we're just multiplying the input with a 440Hz sine wave.

A simple echo again (0.4 seconds), but with the output of the read-head multiplied with a 440Hz sine wave.

Another javascript echo effect. This one has one write-head, as usual, but it has 5 separate read-heads each moving at a random speed between 0.5 and 1.5 times realtime.

Another effect written in javascript: Combined vibrato and tremolo.

Stacking lots of echoes gives you a really nice shimmering effect. This is over 50 of the javascript echo effects I made yesterday, all working one after the other. It pushed my macbook air's cpu up to about 90% but still worked in realtime - impressive!

Wrote a basic echo effect in javascript. This is actually 12 instances of the effect, running in series, so it's a pretty extreme result. Amazingly though, these 12 instances run in realtime on my macbook air with the cpu still under 50%

Working on my own cover of 'Somebody I used to know', using Zoe's piano and my guitar. You can still hear the original, at a very reduced volume - I have that on one track, and I'm building up all the other tracks using it as a guide.

Audio processing in javascript. The drum-loop was done in Ableton, using a classic 808 kit, and the distortion effect was written in javascript.

Some weird combination of morse-code and bagpipes :)

Making a little drum loop using some Collision instruments in Ableton.

Playing around with dubstep-style 'wobble bass' sounds in Ableton.

First time playing with Ableton Live Suite. I like it!

Playing around with some very basic AM and FM synthesis. I made this using javascript and it plays in realtime! The spidermonkey JS engine is incredibly fast - only a factor of about 3 slower than C in my tests.

Happy new year everyone!