EM Web Clips for February 2004

Jan 22, 2004 12:00 PM

APPLE COMPUTER SoundTrack (Mac OS X) (p. 116)

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Apple SoundTrack WC01.mp3
Here’s an MP3 example of a blues progression that was put together using clips of bass, drums, and piano from Soundtrack’s library. The bass and piano clips were transposed and edited in Soundtrack in order to make them fit against the IV and V chords. After those tracks were set, the rhythm guitar was overdubbed using the Single Take recording feature.

Apple SoundTrack WC02.mp3
Here’s an MP3 example of a 30-second piece of music that could be a score or music bed. The opening section is somewhat ethereal with a piano melody, and then the back half kicks in with a pulsing electronic beat and distorted guitar. This was assembled using clips from Soundtrack’s library as well as a live, overdubbed guitar.

CREAMWARE Noah (p. 140)

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Voices from the Machine (p. 29)

Speech Synth mp3 clip#1
Four online text-to-speech translations of the sentence, "Let's record a record." The translations are from the University of Twente, Netherlands (http://wwwtios.cs.utwente.nl/say/form); the Center for Spoken Language Understanding (http://cslu.cse.ogi.edu/tts/demos/index.html); Bell Labs/Lucent (no longer available online); and AT&T (http://www.research.att.com/~ttsweb/cgi-bin/ttsdemo).

Speech Synth mp3 clip#2
Ten vowel phonemes synthesized at typical male (125 Hz) and female (250 Hz) pitches. The sounds correspond to the vowels in the words beet, bit, bet, bat, but, hot, bought, foot, boot, and bird.

Speech Synth mp3 clip#3
The original spoken word electronic is followed by nine versions synthesized from the spectrogram. The first three are synthesized additively with the spectrogram un-transposed, transposed up a tritone, and transposed down a tritone. The next three are synthesized subtractively using the same spectrogram, but transposing the narrow pulse-wave source. The final three, which are doubled in length, are also subtractive using a varying pitch, a chord, and white noise as the source. Notice that changing the pitch with additive resynthesis also changes the formants, producing the familiar Munchkin effect, whereas with subtractive resynthesis, the pitch of the source changes while the formants remain unchanged.

Speech Synth mp3 clip#4
Step-sequences controlling parallel bandpass-filter frequencies will produce speech-like sounds when using a narrow pulse-wave source.

VIRSYN Cube 1.01 (Mac/Win) (p. 126)

WC1.mp3
The sound in this example is three repetitions of the morphing envelope. It was generated by a single key press.

WC2.mp3
This file uses extremely short, repeating morphing envelopes with one segment extended to create the delay in the repeat that occurs at the end of the phrase.

WC3.mp3
This example was created by holding down a single key until the sound morphed from the first Source to the last, and then back again to the first.

WC4.mp3
In this example, the arpeggiator was set to the Up mode and a range of one octave. The rhythmic and melodic pattern is created by pressing and sustaining four notes, one at a time.

WC5.mp3
This sound uses a large Spread control, which gives it the clear inharmonic quality of a bell.

WC6.mp3
This file uses four custom Sound Sources with a simple path for the morphing envelopes. The repeated notes are produced using the arpeggiator.

WC7.mp3
In this sound, sustaining a note loops the morphing envelopes, which produces the repeated notes. Playing different pitches triggers different timbres.

STEINBERG D'cota 1.0 (Mac/Win) (p. 148)

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