I wrote a UGen the other day that allows you to change the tick rate (or sample rate, if you like), of any UGen that you patch to it. After making a mouse-driven example to test it out, I created this example so that the change in the tick rate could be driven by the audio itself. Here, the current loudness (RMS amplitude, to be exact) of the audio being looped directly adjusts the playback speed. Louder parts result in a higher tick rate. What you get sounds like a really broken record player. Not only is it stuck looping the same four bars, but it sounds like the timing belt is having all sorts of issues. Check it out!

I’ve been meaning to try out some digital Moog filter code. A digital Moog filter is simply a filter that attempts to model the analog filters found on Moog synthesizers. It’s got two knobs: frequency and resonance. I yanked some code from musicdsp.org, a wonderful resource, and wrote a really simple UGen with it. I meant to write more of a song, but there’s never enough time for that in these evening coding forays. So instead, you get this kind of avant-garde slow tuning thing using amplitude modulation and tweaking of the filter values. Have a listen!

I’ve been working on a music game on and off for the past month for the TIGSource A Game By Its Cover compo. It’s inspired by this fake game cartridge:

You control a character in a 2D side-scrolling world and collect Jams, which you can then play to build up a sweet tune. There are other boombox dudes in the world who will jam with you when you are playing what they want to hear. The goal is to simply collect all the jams in the level and then just jam out with them.

CHECK IT

Credits:

Amanda Williams – Environment Art
Damien Di Fede – Music, Design, Programming
Kevin Bennett – Music, SFX
Oscar Garza – Animation
Sean McIntosh – Environment Art, Character Design

I had the wacky idea of using an envelope follower on a kick drum part to drive the center frequency of an oscillator. So I dug up some envelope following code on the internet and threw that together with some bits from the microtalk tune. Have a listen.

I recently gave a 5 minute “microtalk” about Minim at an Austin IGDA event and included in it a couple examples using the new UGen framework. In fact, I wrote the presentation in Processing, but I don’t think it is really interesting enough to post the entire application. Instead, I pulled out the song I programmed for it as a standalone sketch. Check it out.

This Sound Byte gives you sliders to control the parameters of a GranulateSteady UGen, which allows you chop up a sound as it plays. I’ve created a loop from the song Again and Again by The Bird and The Bee, which will hopefully get annoying enough that you’ll want to chop it into indiscernibility. The buttons along the side let you set the range of the sliders from quite small, to a full second.

In February 2010, the Red Bull Music Academy prompted Warp Records and Ninja Tune for a Soundclash on a 3D sound system, staged in the Loading Bay of the Royal Albert Hall. FIELD developed a generative real-time application especially for this event, which motion designers Quayola and Thomas Traum used to design and perform soundreactive visuals for the sets of Plaid, Clark, Mira Calix and many more.

Further down in the article it mentions that the application was built with Processing and uses Minim for the “sound interaction”.