Music 171 homework 2
This assignment is to use Pd arrays to generate a sequence of
musical pitches and to play them using a recorded soundfile. Your
successful patch should sound like this. (Note: the exact pitches and speed are
not important, just the general idea.)
UPDATE; with phasiing turned on as in step 5 below, the patch
should rather sound something like this.
To make the patch (each of the following steps is worth 2 points
for a total of 10):
- Download this flute recording.
Load it into an array in your patch. (You can use the soundfiler
object to load it; be sure to use the "-resize" flag to get the
array resized to the size of the soundfile. Make the array save its
contents using the properties dialog, so that you don't have to
make the patch automatically load it each time. (This flag can
reset itself spontaneously so make sure it's activated.)
- Using phasor~ and the technique shown in class Thursday (adding
0.5 and using the wrap~ object), make two phasors that are one half
cycle out of phase, to read into the downloaded array. Use the
windowing technique (also shown in class) to control the amplitude
of each one of the two tabread4~ outputs so that they are zero at
each moment the phase wraps around from 1 to 0, to avoid hearing a
'click' sound.
- Make another array, with 12 elements. Its y-value range should
be set from 2 (for example) to 0 as you descend from its top to
bottom. This table should control the frequency of the phasor~
object described above, so that you hear a sequence of 12 different
speeds of playback (which will sound like 12 different musical
pitches.) You will have to use another phasor~ object to read the
values in sequence, and a tabread~ object (no interpolation!) to
read the 12 values. This is the same operation as reading the flute
array except that the table only has 12 values instead of the many
thousands that the flute array will have. When you have this
working you should hear a sequence of 12 audible transpositions of
the flute sound.
- Find reasonable frequency for the controlling phasor~ object,
and reasonable values to put in the 12-element array (which
controls the pitches), and a reasonable range of values over which
to read the array holding the recorded flute sound. Once this is
working you should hear a sequence of 12 pitches that repeats
forever.
- Once you hear the sequence of pitches, you can then duplicate
the entire patch, this time using a slightly different frequency
(only 0.1 or even 0.01 different) to get the effect in the example.
Make sure that the patch you make makes sound as soon as you open
it and start DSP.
Note: the included flute recording was downloaded from
freesound.org. It's on a Creative Commons license (attribution;
non-commercial), uploaded by Carlos_Vaquero.
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