Tuesday, March 27, 2007

  • 03:14 you won't get back

    EDIT: I put together an animation of a piece of the virtual metal I used to create these sounds. It's near the bottom of this post. Do check it out.

    Today's blog consists of a collection of sounds I built from scratch using no sampling (well, almost...you'll see). A palette, if you will, thrown at you in random order. Starts off kinda slow, but builds nicely considering it's a bunch of random sounds. See...the thing now is for me to weave these primitive "sound kernels"  into something like music. Cause while they're delightfully and playfully um...crazy at this point, they're quite simply not yet music.

    Nope. Not by a fairly long shot.

    I hope they make you smile, though...

    cause that's always cool. ;)

    -Phil

    TECHNICAL NOTE. WHERE THESE SOUNDS COMED FROM: i wrote a program which models solids (a metal, for instance) as a collection of mathematically defined atoms that talk to their neighboring atoms in such a way as to maintain the shape of the solid - this is very similar to how solids are "modeled" by the real word. anyway, if you mathematically "bang" on a piece of the mathematical metal living inside my computer, it'll ringggg...just like a piece of real metal will ringggg. these sounds are recordings of variously designed and banged-upon bits of my "virtual metal".

    Plate_Animation_Lowres

    ^ Here is a piece of virtual metal. I do things to it. First I stretch it vertically (by pulling up on the top and down on the bottom), then I release it. You can see the resulting wave travel through the plate as it settles again to its happy size and original square shape;  as soon as the plate thinks I'm going to leave it alone, though, I push its lower left corner toward the right. You don't like that I did that? Too bad; that's just how I roll. Anyway, in response, as you can see, the plate compresses where I push it and, in time, grudgingly moves off to the right. As if that's not enough, I stretch and release the plate again in the final frames of the sequence. Poor plate. Yeah, well...it's pretty tough.

    To all you young punks out there shunning or psyched out by math and science, I urge you to reconsider -- CAUSE THIS SHIT IS COOL. And trust me, it's really not very hard to do. I'm no genius. I'm just a bear. Goin' over the mountain. To see what I can see.

     

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