Guest Contribution by Alex May If you were born in the 70’s or 80’s and played video games, you’ll no doubt have fond memories of the early days of game audio when consoles were incapable of playing back more than basic pulse waves or noise. All sounds had to be forged from these primitives, and game SFX were rarely even slightly reminiscent of anything actually real. Now, … [Read more...]
Car Engine Approximation In Max
Years ago, when I first started dabbling in the deep and dark world of Max/MSP, I attempted to create the sound of a car engine. This month's theme (which is 'vehicles', if you didn't know) reminded me about it. I opened up the patch after ages and was a bit appalled by the state of it. There are hidden skeletons in every old patch! Instead of digging through a … [Read more...]
Review: Rob Papen’s The 4 Element Synth
Let me just start by making one thing perfectly clear: I have never been a synth head, mostly because I’ve always found that designing with recorded audio is much more immediately satisfying. Rob Papen’s The 4 Element Synth might change that. I have taken courses, read magazines, looked up tutorials online and otherwise tried very hard to wrap my head around synthesizing my … [Read more...]
New Research Initiative Will Dig Deep Into All Things Reverb
A project funded by the EU is taking on the challenge of modelling, synthesizing and analysing acoustic reverberation. The DREAMS (Dereverberation, Reverberation of Audio, Music and Speech) project began in February 2013 and is expected to run for three years. The research initiative is being led by the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), and will focus on four areas seen … [Read more...]
Pure Data Wavetable Synth – Part 9 (Fin)
For those of you who just want to play around with the finished project, there is a download link at the bottom of the article. Despite all of this, I’m still relatively new at Pure Data and the Max language. To those who chime in with corrections or clarifications in the comments, you are most appreciated! If you’re new to PD, make sure you check the comments section for … [Read more...]
Generating Complexity in Max
Guest Contribution by Mark Durham With this post I want to look at some strategies for generating control data in Max, or more specifically generating complex envelopes for controlling parameters. Now I expect that designing envelopes is nothing new for most Designing Sound readers; it's been a staple technique for manipulating parameters on a timeline in most DAW's, … [Read more...]
A Quick Introduction to SuperCollider
Guest Contribution by Graham Gatheral Let's be honest: code can be daunting. All those words and numbers and operators and punctuation errors... For a start, there's no GUI. How are you supposed to make anything without a GUI?! Well, as we'll see later we can make a GUI-based synth in SuperCollider with just a few dozen lines of code! But let's put GUIs to one side for now, … [Read more...]