Category Archives: Software

Introduction to Pure Data

Posted on September 23, 2010 | 2 Comments

This is a basic introduction to PD that was written for my technical writing class.  I reposted it here as a good overview of PD for those who have never used it.

Overview
When it comes to choosing a programming language, there are many choices.  For low level designs concerned with speed, assembly language or C could be the way to go.  For portable higher level designs involving graphics or games, an object oriented approach using Java might be more appropriate (1).  For a more specialized task, a more specialized language can be used.  Pure Data(PD) is a programming language tailored to real-time multimedia creation and processing.  PD specializes in audio processing, but also has libraries available for graphics and video.

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Creating Surround Sound With Open Source Tools

Posted on August 8, 2010 | Leave a comment

Ever since our apartment got a 7.1 surround sound home theater setup, I thought it would be pretty cool to find a way to create a surround sound mix to listen to on our system. I’ll start off by saying that I haven’t found a complete solution yet, but I’ll use this post to outline a lot of the open source tools I’ve tried and hopefully provide a starting point for your own research if you want to try something similar.

I normally use Pro Tools LE on OS X as my main DAW, but surround mixing costs a lot more through the DV toolkit or the Complete Production Toolkit. I’ve been looking for a reason to try out the open source DAW Ardour (http://ardour.org/), and it seemed that by being so open, there should be a few plugins and options that could extend it to create 5.1 surround sound.

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Progress on Recursion Looper Live

Posted on July 9, 2010 | 1 Comment

Recursion Looper Live

Overview

Recursion Looper Live(RLL) is meant to be a more immediate performance oriented looper.  There are 4 total loops that allow for 4 separate song sections.  Each loop is tempo independent and when one loop is playing, the others are stopped.  An overall latching mute to allow for additional musical fills and unlimited overdub for each loop are provided.  RLL is meant to be controlled using a pedalboard with 6 buttons(can be custom midi mapped or assigned to keyboard presses) and computer keypresses mapped for easy control during live performance.  Since each loop can be armed for overwrite, an entire live set can be performed with only one patch, with no need to reopen any files.

Reason for a Second Version

After using it for a while, the standard recursion Looper began to feel a little bulky to use.  Everything had to start out synced to a click track, and while the A and B sections and features helped make interesting songs, there was still a lot of repeating and time wasted while adding in extra layers to the loops.  Recursion Looper Live hopefully solves many of these problems.


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Interactive Multimedia Exhibit-Pure Data

Posted on November 9, 2009 | Leave a comment

This page will provide some information on an interative A/V exhibit I made for the Springdale Church Artist Cafe in fall 2009.

The exhibit used 3 midi controllers and a webcam to communicate with a custom PD (Pure Data) patch.  The patch had some preset music patterns, synths and visual effects to provide music and visual art to react to the user’s input.

All the software was run off the gateway laptop which was also driving the large TV screen visuals.  The PD patch used the GEM library for all the video processing.  The Tascam control surface in the middle allowed the users to color mix, rotate, re-size, reshape, mix, and morph the webcam input. The Korg triton was used as a MIDI control to adjust the 5 separate synth sounds and associated effects.  The small M-Audio controller controller alternated drum patters, samples, effects, and the tempo of the overall performance.

The most interesting aspect was watching how people interacted with each other and the installation.  The visuals were more compelling to most people, because the user control was more apparent.  When people did take time to really tweak the drum patterns and effects though, they came up with interesting sounds that I didn’t even imagine.

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Simple Synth-Pure Data

Posted on April 27, 2009 | Leave a comment

This is one of the first pd projects I completed, it’s a simple synthesizer with three unique oscillators and one modulation for each oscilator, and overall filter.  Control for the 8 parameters can be accesed using an 8 knob style midi controller such as the MidAir 25 or Oxygen 8.

Simple Synth was mainly an experiment to try out using GriPD for user interfaces, to use this patch you must have PD and GriPD installed, you can get GriPD from:

http://crca.ucsd.edu/~jsarlo/gripd/

To download the Latest version, Click Here

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