Instrument

So far Piezzo seems to be the basis of my instrument. I want to scratch the surface of piezzo with differnt objects like a bow, brush or a hand grinder.Putting it under water and then hitting it on the surface of the glass also gives interesting metallic sounds.Brush and grinder gives quite differnt characterstic to the resultant piezzo's vibrations/sound. Generating complex rhythmic patterns at a very high tempo by touching the surface of piezzo by a grinder fascinates me quite a lot. A easy and interactive way of generating metallic rhythmical patterns.
Further,exploring these ideas I want apply all these techniques and take piezzo as a Line In into the computer and use SuperColliider( or rather use Arduino )to synthesize the incoming signal of the piezzo. So far I have experimented by PitchShifting the incoming signal of the Piezzo or convoluting it with any other sound source.
I need to look more into the Arduino patches and explore them to make interesting sound material.However I am more interested in sticking to SuperCollider since I am in a learning phase of that and spending more time on it will be more benificial for me..( I would need approval to do that).
Breadboarding is interesiting, however its quite fragile and a temporary solution( atleast for me).Old school technology is fine but I find it very time consuming or/and not quite an ideal approach for me to make music with at this stage.There is so much I can do with computers and playing with toys I can leave for the other people to explore.Playing with IC's and resistors is OK but I find it to be kind of pointless at this stage (1) because so far it has not been a priority and I need to spend alot more time (2) Time is very crucial and I have to very sure where am I putting my time..I like electronics and their construction and I do understand it might open up new possibilites for me and thats why I am not rulling it out totally and I will definately be exploring them in the holidays, and hopefully I can use them as part of me instrument ..
I would actually like to have kind of a percussion kit( a basket of few hand constructed objects or miscellinous tools) all hooked up to my computer through line In or a microphone to change their characterstics and timbre by applying various synthesis techniques.
This is a scratch,I will have more ideas as the time goes by in the holidays

Week 7

Creative Computing : Physical Modelling (2)

Quoting PMPD documentation intro:" These objects provide real-time simulations, specially physical behaviors. pmpd can be used to create natural dynamic systems, like a bouncing ball, string movement, Brownian movement, chaos, fluid dynamics, sand, gravitation, and more. It can also be used to create displacements thus allowing a completely dynamic approach .With pmpd physical dynamics can be modelled without knowing the global equation of the movement. Only the cause of the movement and the involved structure are needed for the simulation. pmpd provides the basic objects for this kind of simulation. Assembling them allows the creation of a very large variety of dynamic systems ."

CODE
Sound Examples:

Referenes:
* Haines.Christian."Workshop-7-sem2 conducted on Physical Modelling - PMPD library (physical modelling) created by Cyrille Henry on PureData.Programming with SuperCollider".6 September'2007.Electronic Music Unit.University of Adelaide, South Australia.
* PMPD : Documentation and examples
*Collins.Nick and Olofsson.Fredrick.Tutorials on SuperCollider.Chapter 11.1
* McCartney , James et al . 2007,SuperCollider Inbuilt Help.
* Source Forge, http://supercollider.sourceforge.net/

Week 6: mid way

Creative Computing: Physical Modelling

'Physical modeling' refers to the use of computers to model or simulate the sounds of traditional musical instruments or any analogue sound.
"There are two different general methods for synthesis of musical instrument sounds. One approach is to look at the spectrum of a real instrument and try to recreate it. This includes methods such as additive synthesis and frequency modulation (FM). These produce sounds with similar structure, but the parameters involved have no relation to the physical parameters of an instrument. The other popular approach is to use a sample of the instrument, such as in wavetable synthesis and samplers. In both of these cases, you're creating sounds without any consideration for how the real instrument actually creates those sounds.

"Karplus-Strong string synthesis is a method of physical modelling synthesis that loops a short waveform through a filtered delay line to simulate the sound of a hammered or plucked string or some kind of percussion . This is a subtractive synthesis technique based on a feedback loop similar to that of a comb filter."

References:

* Haines.Christian."Workshop-6-sem2 conducted on Physical Modelling - Karplus-Strong string synthesis.Programming with SuperCollider".30 August 2007.Electronic Music Unit.University of Adelaide, South Australia.
* Anon. 2007, Karplus-Strong string synthesis, 2007, .
* "Tutorial 9". IXI 2007, Software, IXI, 11/1, .
"Chapter 16". Cottle, David Michael 2005, Computer Music (with examples in
SuperCollider 3).

Audio Arts : Film Concepts
Feedback is the signal that is looped back to control a system within itself. This loop is called the feedback loop. A control system usually has input and output to the system; when the output of the system is fed back into the system as part of its input, it is called the "feedback."
In cybernetics and control theory, feedback is a process whereby some proportion of the output signal of a system is passed (fed back) to the input. This is often used to control the dynamic behavior of the system.

My work is based on feedback theory and digital manipulations. Visuals are generated by the process of video feedback which are then manilulated by using various filters. The end result will be of collarge of various shots and filtered result applied to the generated feedback.
(my film analysis coming soon)