PLEASE NOTE: SOUNDMAGIC FX IS NO LONGER BEING DEVELOPED. IT HAS BEEN REPLACED BY A SUITE OF REAL-TIME AUDIO UNIT PLUGINS FOR MAC OS X CALLED SOUNDMAGIC SPECTRAL

Tips and Techniques:

Below I have tried to list some tricks with my favourite combination of SoundMaker and SoundMagic FX. Note, however, that I consider myself first and foremost an electroacoustic composer, so I tend to take a very creative stance towards using the digital sound process - I am always looking for the transformative potential of a process and have developed SoundMagic FX with this axiom in mind. The tips and techniques are therefore also categorised in transformative terms - that is to say, how does this process affect our perception of the sound? Most of these tips and techniques, then, are concerned with abstracting sound - that is, taking a sound that might be recognisable, and turning it into something unrecognisable, thus opening the way to source recognition ambiguities. Basically, I just love sounds that make you say "What the hell is that....?!"

I have created three categories for my tips and techniques, although I may decide to change this as the page grows and develops:

1. Enveloping (exploring the nature of the sound's amplitude envelope)
2. Spectral Modifications (looking at ways of changing a sound's pitch content)
3. Process Categories (categorising the SoundMagic FX suite into their functions)

This icon:  indicates that there is something for you to try yourself in SoundMaker.

Enveloping:

 
• The transient
  • The transient is a very important part of an attack-decay type sound. These sounds are often caused by something being struck or hammered as in the case of most percussion instruments, although in fact they occur in most physical sound-producing systems as the short duration of disturbance or turbulence before a stable standing vibration is set up. The transient part is the brief noise-like attack at the very beginning of the sound, which can be viewed by careful zooming in SoundMaker. If we remove the transient, leaving the resonance only, we can completely change how we perceive the sound.

   Record a sustained piano chord. Remove the attack transient. What does it sound like now?

   
• Synchronising transients:
  • By using the Peak Synchronisation effect, we can take the transients from many different sounds, and 'line them up', so to speak. Why is this useful? Because of the psychoacoustic phenomena that we tend to hear synchronised transients as being initiated from the same source - they 'fuse' into one sound, in a sense.

   Record a drum being hit. Synchronise with the piano resonance. Now mix them together.

   
• Creating transients:
  • Using Alberto's Exponential Decay effect, it is possible to simulate a transient on a fairly stable sound. First, Normalise the sound to full volume, then select from the transient point to the end of the sound, select Exponential Decay and choose a figure depending on how sudden you want your attack-decay envelope to appear. Try doing this for a few different sonorities, and then Peak Synchronising them...

   Record an instrument sustaining a long note. Normalise, then Exponential decay.

   
• Creating an Anacrusis:
  • By reversing an attack-decay shape, we can create a sound that seems to swell in energy (as opposed to dissipating in energy). We have a transient at the end of the sound, instead of at the beginning. There are few, if any, sounds in nature that have this sort of spectral shape (or spectromorphology - get used to this term, it'll crop up again and again), and therefore this is a good way to reach sonic abstraction (commonly known as a 'what the hell is that' sound). By synchronising the end transient with the start transient from some other sounds, we can get some pretty damn interesting things happening... (can you tell this is a favourite technique of mine yet?)

   Reverse the sound from the previous example. Synchronise it with the drum/piano sound.

• Retaining the Transient:
  • When doing a time stretch, it is often desirable to retain the transient unstretched, as this aids listener comprehension - when the transient is stretched out, the sound can often become artificial or unrecognisable, although in some cases this may be desirable. Using the Time-Varying Time Stretch, however, one is able to specify that the transient remain unstretched.

     

• Injecting energy:
  • Use Alberto's Envelope plug-in to give a custom envelope shape to a relatively stable sound - maybe a sound that has had it's transient removed. Other effects that can cause corrugation - Granular Synthesis, Chunk Munger, Tremolo. Possibly my favourite, however, is Envelope Substitution which takes the time-varying envelope of one sound and applies it to another. By synchronising the original and processed sounds, and gently crossfading between them, some rather nice effects can be incurred.
    
• Smoothing out:
  • Sometimes we want to stabilise a sound - that is, remove the energy from the spectrum in some sense or another. SoundMagic has a number of effects that can smooth out the spectrum, although, funnily enough, the Smooth effect is not a good choice for this of work. I would suggest either a Reverb, a Spectral Time Stretch, some Granular Synthesis, a bit of Spectral Freezing or a spot of Spectral Blurring. All of these effects have certain pros and cons: Reverb can sound just a bit too 'spacy', although here's a nice idea: try putting a long reverb tail onto a sound, and then using just the reverb tail as your new sound, ready to be reenveloped.

Spectral Modifications:

• The note to noise continuum:
  • Electroacoustic music practitioners are often interested in the so-called note to noise continuum. By this we mean that we are interested in exploiting the acoustic fact that the difference between perceiving pitch (that is, periodic sound) and perceiving noise (that is, aperiodic sound) can sometimes be made ambiguous, or used as structural or transformative elements. Electroacoustic music has the ability to differentiate and articulate both a pitched discourse (ie using sounds with a strong harmonic content) and noise discourse (using sounds that are largely noise based). I will now deal with some ways to traverse the note to noise continuum using the effects found in SoundMagic FX.
    
• Removing partials:
  • Spectral Tracing is a particularly useful effect for "paring down" a sound. It does this by analysing a sound, and retaining only a percentage of the loudest or softest partials. If you are retaining only the loudest partials (which will be the option you require 95% of the time), then you can achieve this wonderful effect of reducing what might be a very complex, very noisy sound down to its most prominent consituent frequencies. By choosing a very low percentage, say 1%, you can reduce the sound of the sea, to an ethereal interplay of sine waves.

   Record the sound of water (sea, bath, tap, etc.) Spectral trace it to 1% of the loudest partials.

   
• Filterbanks:
  • When wishing to pare down a noise-based sample, we are often interested in the pitched perception of the result. For example, if we have other metallic-based sounds in our piece, we may wish to pare down a noise-based sound to an inharmonic spectrum, in order to refer to the metallic content. Or we may wish to base the filtered sound around some preconceived harmonic scheme, or harmonic field. The Filterbank and Comb Filter Bank are extremely useful in this context. We can specify the pitches in terms of Hz or equal-tempered semitones in banks of up to six filters. The titles of the presets show the range of possibilities - from bell-like sonorities, to ceramic sounds, to very gentle Aeolian harp resonances. It is important to note that the Filterbank is necessarily reductive - that is to say, we can never add resonances that are not there in the first place (except for the Comb Filter Bank) which adds specific resonances at comb-like intervals (see a spectral plot).

   Run the same water sound through a ceramic filterbank (under the presets popup)

   
• Time Domain artifacts:
  • Another way in which we can impart pitched elements to our noise-based sounds is to use the particular (some might say unwanted) characteristics of the time domain time stretches. The way in which, for example, Brassage Time Stretch, Waveset Time Stretch, Chunk Munger and Granular Synthesis operate impart particular pitched artifacts. Why? Because they work by taking small chunks of the sound, and repeating them at small intervals, crossfaded to ensure a smooth result. However, this repetition of small chunks means that you get the same piece of audio occuring at least twice at a fixed distance. For those of you who are awake, the words "delay line" should jump out at you (arrgh!). And the word delay line should bring the words "comb filter" to mind. Basically, peaks that are repeated at a short enough distance (ie more than about 20-40 Hz, that is shorter than 0.05 milliseconds), and are reasonably stable, will be perceived as pitch, at the frequency of their repetition. The stability factor can be played around with in Granular Synthesis by changing the variance of the grain length and grain hop. For example, if you interpolate from a large grain size variance to zero grain size variance, you will notice an increase in pitchedness - an audible traversing of the note to noise continuum. Interestingly, in Stockhausen's Kontakte, he had done a very similar thing using voltage controllers... at least you guys have a Mac... ;-)

Process Categories:

• Envelope Modifications
  • Envelope Substitution
  • Granular Synthesis
  • Peak Synchronisation
• Corrugation
  • Granular Synthesis
  • Envelope Substitution
  • Waveset Interleaving
  • Spectral Interleaving
  • Waveset Omission
• Spectrum Modifications
  • Spectral Blurring
  • Spectral Tracing
  • Spectral Freezing
  • Spectral Stretching
• Spectral Smoothing
  • Any of the time stretching processes (see below)
  • Spectral Blurring
  • Spectral Freezing
• Constructive Distortion
  • Waveset Harmonic Distortion
  • Waveset Reversal
• Time Stretching
  • Brassage Time Stretch
  • Spectral Time Stretch
  • Time-Varying Time Stretch
  • Granular Synthesis
  • Granular Synthesis Lite
  • Chunk Munger
  • Waveset Time Stretch
• Filtering
  • Comb Filter Bank
  • Filterbank
  • Remove DC Offset
• Brassage Effects
  • Sample Hose
  • Brassage Time Stretch
  • Chunk Munger
  • Granular Synthesis
  • Granular Synthesis Lite
• Pitch Enhancement
  • Any of the time stretching processes (see above)
  • Time-Varying Delay
• Cross synthesis effects
  • Mutate
  • Crossfade
  • Iterative Crossfade
  • Spectral Masking
  • Spectral Interleaving
  • Waveset Interleaving

  More tips and techniques to come.... Watch this space!