117934~
Live Granular Engine
„I let the chord ring and tell the software with a gesture to endlessly repeat those exact 500 milliseconds. Then I access the elementary parts of the tone and transform them into something new. I keep on playing and combine the newly generated sound with familiar listening habits up to the point, where I gesture the software once again to endlessly repeat those exact 283 milliseconds.“
– Ralph Rubin
Composition and performance of a sound manipulated piano piece!
| Work | Master thesis by Ralph Rubin in the degree course "Interactive Mediasystems" |
| University | University of Applied Sciences in Augsburg |
| Reader | Prof. Robert Rose and Prof. Dr. Michael Kipp |
| Written in | MaxMSP (v.7) |
| Used Hardware | Leap Motion V2 sensor, self-built 32-pin single-coil pick-up, Oktava Mk 012-01 MSP2 Pair, MOTU Traveler MK3, Behringer FCB 1010 |
What the hell is going on there?
117934~ is an experiment to extract new sounds from a classical upright piano via sound manipulation. The audience should be presented with a composition of familiar listening habits and newly created sounds. The sound is picked up by a self-built 32-pin single-coil pick-up and two condenser microphones, gets manipulated in a piece of software and is finally presented to the listener.
This work is focused on the development of a software to edit live-recorded sound material in real-time. The MAX/MSP-based software allows the access of the latest 12 seconds of played audio. With the help of a gesture recognition sensor it is possible to choose any sector of this sequence and let it repeat endlessly. The chosen sector gets buffered and can be manipulated by granular-synthesis in real-time. The program flow and parametrization of the granular-synthesis is visualized by a specially developed Graphical User Interface and is controlled by a foot-controller.
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Settings Here you can choose the audio-device, the inputs, the midi-port and the driver. |
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Circular-Buffer This buffer constantly records the last played 12 seconds without any hearable acoustic breakpoints. |
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Temporary-Buffer As soon as you have catched 12 seconds from the Circular-Buffer, it gets automatically copied into the Temporary-Buffer. There you do the exact selection of your piece of audio by gesture control via the leap motion sensor. |
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Grain-Buffer Now you can copy your audio-selection into one of four Grain-Buffers to do granular synthesis. You can manipulate your audio-selection by changeing the following parameters: Grainsize, quantity, amount, speed, stereo-spread, fade and position-variation. With B.I.T. (”BangInTime”) you can force the audio-selection to start from the beginning. |
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Step-Sequencer Finally you can put the manipulated audio-selection into a step-sequencer. There you can create rhythmic patterns by controlling the step-sequencer`s interface with the leap motion sensor |
| Used Max-Externals in 117934~ | Akamatsu, Masayuki: aka.keyboard und aka.leapmotion. http://akamatsu.org/aka/max/objects/ (CC 3.0) |
| Dobrian, Christopher: tap tempo. http://sites.uci.edu/camp2014/2014/05/20/tap-to-set-tempo/ |
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| Muir, Chris: EveryNumber. https://cycling74.com/forums/topic/smoothing-out-midi-value-jumps/ |
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| Pasquet, Oliver: op.buffercopy. http://www.opasquet.fr/dl/op.buffercopy.zip |
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| Rozendal, Timo: grainstretch~ (v20120126). http://www.timorozendal.nl/?p=456 |
The Live-setup in detail
One more thing:The 32-pin single-coil pick-up.
A further experiment in 117934~ is a self-built 32-pin single-coil pick-up. A lot of gain is used to push it loud and the sound is quite special and reminds a bit of the sound of a Yamaha CP-80 but convince yourself and watch the video. The sound you will hear is solely recorded with the pick-up, no microphones were used.
| Special thanks to | Gerhard Stachulla, Julia Barton, Claus Hoffmann, Professor Robert Rose, Professor Dr. Michael Kipp, Elias Naphausen, Benjamin Paska, Dominik and Valentin Scherer, Jakob Nicklbauer and YEAH. |