Envelope Piece

I was thinking about the creation and use of envelopes and made a little study piece. The breakpoint windows at the top of the patch are the piece in essence. I must admit that I was more interested in exploring the textures than any coherent compositional plan, but it sort of works. Right now it is very monophonic, but that would be another level of complexity and I didn't want to get to carries away.

EnvPiece


Most of the signal processing is pretty straight forward, using a modulo (% in Max land) and then multiplication of the signal in order to provide frequency control data for a saw tooth wave, rectangular wave as well control for amplitude. There is a lot of recycling, which makes the patch for messier than I ought to allow, but it is also fun to just make a piece in a few hours.

In the end, I now have a some techniques for generative music that I wanted for control of the Viola piece for Shannon and I have what turns out to be a pretty robust and flexible sketch pad for seeing and hearing ideas. One improvement that I should attempt is aesthetically interesting visualization of the data. But I grow fatigued.

Ok, less fatigued, but the video capture combined the 2 audio streams, there-by creating phase cancellation all over the place. It has an interesting sounds, but not really the right sound. Listening back and forth to the video and the audio is quite illustrative, phase cancellation can destroy stuff.