Category: expanded studio practice

Recently, I have been learning the building blocks of a synthesiser in PureData and Bela, implementing them into a tactile housing will be another challenge Im excited to tackle, whenever I get there. I have been inspired mainly by two pieces of equipment, the Lyra 8 and Jomox T-Resonator ll.

The Lyra 8 is interesting to me because of its eight individually tuneable oscillators which can interact and modulate each other to create rich textures unlike anything I have encountered on any other piece of hardware. I would like to have this individual tuneability in what I am going to call the DreamBox, each oscillator should be useable as an LFO or tone generator and should have some sort of effect on multiple other parameters to create engulfing drones intuitively. If the DreamBox has multiple outputs, each oscillator can be sent to an individual speaker for the cymatic display. The messy lay out and sporadic placement of knobs is what I find interesting about the T-Resonator ll, I would like a machine that had no labels (apart from outputs), so that you have to figure out how to make sounds with it your own way. The machine shall have its own way and the player will have to discover their own way to get the most out of it.

As soon as the listener learns how to open himself totally to [the music]. It carries him away to himself. p.142

Through Music To The Self/ Peter Michael Hamel

What if the speakers were all around the room/on the walls? Creating more interest by allowing space for people to walk in front of the laser to partially block the visual?

Lasers hitting multiple mirrors before after the speaker?

PureData certainly has a steep learning curve. But with the brief time I have spent trying, failing and trying again within its confines, I see now the limitless possibilities that mastering this program will hold. We spent the first few weeks slowly building patches that crackled, hissing and lapped that came together to make the sound of some kind of abstract fire.

This exercise was a great entrance into the basics of PureData, how it works and what tools we have available. I found the lay out and feel of the program somewhat familiar to when I explored TouchDesigner briefly last year. However, having to remember what each block can contain is going to be a challenge the more I learn. I’m excited to starting to implementing PureData with the Bela boards and see what I can do.

Over the past few weeks in class, I have been expanding on my understanding of PureData and Bela. I have been able to create multiple, independently tuneable oscillators and now I would like to be able to add a filter to the patch. Last week experiments ended with a global tune, which is cool, but not really a feature that I’m looking to add. This week I got something a lot more interesting…

The track below is a demonstration of slowly turning the failed filter from fully closed to fully open. It was captured from headphones connected to the computer by my iPhone, so the presence of the bass is missing. Im still not 100% sure why it is having this effect on the oscillators, but I love how crushed and distorted the sounds become when the parameter is set to maximum! Perhaps I will keep as a feature moving forwards.