Alex McLean

Another screencast, a short one this time, which I’ve been using as a demo in talks.

The haskell source for my vocable synthesis system used in my previous screencasts is now available. I’ve been having fun rewriting this over the last couple of days, and would appreciate any criticism of my code.

I’ve been playing with using words to control the articulation of a physical modelling synthesiser based on the elegant Karplus-Strong algorithm.

The idea is to be able to make instrumental sounds by typing onomatopoeic words. (extra explanation added in the comments)

Here’s my first ever go at playing with it:

For a fuller, more readable experience you’re better off looking at the higher quality avi than the above flash transcoding.

As before, I’m using HSC3 to do the synthesis. If anyone’s interested, I plan to release the full source in September, but the synthesis part is available here

Sounds a bit nicer now… This time with a smaller font and an exciting slither of my desktop visible. Sorry about that, see it a bit bigger over here

An early sketch of a system of vocables for describing manipulations of a sine wave.

The text is a bit small there, it’s better in the original avi version.

Vowels give pitch, and consonants give movements between pitches.

Inspired by the notation of canntaireachd. Made with hsc (Haskell client for scsynth). As ever, code available under GPL
on application.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this. It’s nice to describe a sound in this way but to use it in music the sound has to change over time otherwise it gets repetitive and therefore boring in many situations. I think I either have to develop ways of manipulating these strings programmatically, or ways of manipulating how they are interpreted. Both approaches would involve livecoding of course…