I’ve been good today and kept on track with the plan, working on the patch for the white noise soundfile I posted yesterday. It’s basically done, although I’ve run into an issue where the transport in the standalone (yes! I made a standalone!) isn’t accepting tap tempo. Guess I’ll poke at it for a bit.

I’m keeping it simple because I suspect there’ll already be quite a lot going on and I wanted to just investigate ideas about what the equivalent of blur might be in music, so this one is using some feedback and tapin~/tapout~ delay lines. Also a little bit of pink noise, just to keep things colourful 🙂

A lot of this patch is based on a YouTube tutorial by Joel Rich which is really very rough, but I wanted to see what the effect would be with non-rhythmic music:

On top of that I’ve added the possibility of continuously varying the delay, modifying the amount of pink noise mixed in, switching between modified and unmodified sound and adjusting the feedback level.

I’ve also paid significantly more attention to how the patch looks in presentation this time round, properly annotating everything and exporting it as a standalone (whee!). If I understand correctly, this means that (provided you’re on Mac) you can download the standalone and play with it yourself, even if you don’t have Max! Awesome. I’ve zipped it up with the sound file I’m using or you could of course use any AIFF or WAV you have lying around. There are some notes within the app, and like I say, the tap tempo isn’t working, but beyond that, go for it! If you have any questions, just let me know. I’m shiny and new to this standalone business, as well as Max in general, so it’s quite possible that I have failed massively somewhere. Download standalone & white noise file (ZIP, 57.7MB)

So it’s been a goodly chunk of work – about 7 hours so far today (yes, I’m procrastinating a bit again on the orchestral piece, but I did good work on that late late late last night and hope to do so again tonight!), but should mean I’m entirely on track as per my schedule.

I’ve only done two improvisations with it so far, but quite pleased with how they’re turning out. I don’t think I’m going to need to do ten this time. The main thing is to keep it simple but not hopefully not dull. Here’s the second one:

Also, found this marvellous thing on the interwebs – Nicolas Collins’ notebooks from Alvin Lucier’s 1972/3 ‘Introduction to Electronic Music’ class. What a wonderful thing! Go and check it out if you have any interest in experimental or early electronic music.