I've been working on my first proper piece of Pd-written music. I've learnt a lot about Pd and made some really freaky noises in the process. I'm trying to move away from sequenced-everything into a more organic "live" process of music making.

The piece is called Swings and Roundabouts, with the Swings being noises similar to the creaking of an unoiled playground swing and the Roundabouts being rolling gurgling bass. So far I have only made the patches for the Swings, the sound comes from an emulation of the Amiga computer's Paula sound chip (it plays one-shot and looping samples at a discrete set of frequencies).

The sound parameters are controlled in real time using a Fostex Mixtab MIDI mixer control tablet - 2 channels for each of the 4 Swings, the left of the pair controlling rate of change of parameter and the right controlling base value of parameter. There are 5 parameters per Swing - volume, sample loop start point, sample loop length, sample playback period, and clock loop length. The parameters can take any value, but when they reach the Paula emulation they are quantized appropriately.

A short recording of my friend Trel controlling swingsandroundabouts.pd after about an hour of practice, with the source waveform being a short sample of a 303 type sound:
[url=http://pure-data.iem.at/Members/claudiusmaximus/copyme/swnrb/swnrb200403301910.ogg ]http://pure-data.iem.at/Members/claudiusmaximus/copyme/swnrb/swnrb2004 03301910.ogg

More audio demos, the Pd patches, and screenshots:

[url=http://pure-data.iem.at/Members/claudiusmaximus/copyme/swnrb/ ]http://pure-data.iem.at/Members/claudiusmaximus/copyme/swnrb/


(Audio license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License; Pd patch license: GNU General Public License)

(Warning: paulachannel~.pd must be initialised with a non-zero loop length before use, otherwise Pd goes into an infinite loop in control time => crash. I should really fix this bug sometime...)


Comments please! Especially suggestions for improvement, because it definitely needs improvement

It won't let me edit my post, Access Denied, but those links are broken now after I did some reorganisation. Working links are:

Performance by Trel
[url=http://pure-data.iem.at/Members/claudiusmaximus/copyme/swingsandroundabouts/sounds/swingsandroundabouts-200403301910-demo.ogg ]http://pure-data.iem.at/Members/claudiusmaximus/copyme/swingsandrounda bouts/sounds/swingsandroundabouts-200403301910-demo.ogg

Project home
[url=http://pure-data.iem.at/Members/claudiusmaximus/copyme/swingsandroundabouts/ ]http://pure-data.iem.at/Members/claudiusmaximus/copyme/swingsandrounda bouts/

And I've decided to use the less restrictive Creative Commons ShareAlike License for the audio, but you can use either at your option because I can't unlicense it