Anyone have any cool ideas for a digital Ouija Board? I spent all of last night designing the board, planchette and importing everything into Processing, but right now it only functions as “the real thing” – it’s obviously not weird enough.
My only thoughts so far are MIDI and OSC controllers (I’m not very imaginative), but if anyone wants to do something cool with it, I can toss up the assets and the source – or, most likely just use your suggestion instead.
(Although now that I think about it, I could probably go way further with some of those DSP libraries, but using them imaginatively and with some kind of cohesive purpose is the hard part)
Might just need to create a X/Y coordinate table and then fill in the blank. What would jesus do?
Got this little (VST) guy rolling if anyone wants a backdoor key. It should work on all of the main DAWs, and pumps out as little audio as possible to make clean IRs. It automates, too.
If anyone has cool suggestions, I’m drawing up a ‘synth hacker’ / jammer sort of plugin complete with latch gates, velocity automation, independent voice controls and other things that can allow you to use your synths in strange ways for fast patch designing. If there’s anything you’d like to see, I’d love to implement it and give you a free copy just for being awesome
I have not. I probably won’t. This is just the weirdo nerd corner of the site where we collect these things
I honestly don’t know what problem this solves for me. The best thing I can say given the wholly unfair cursory glance I gave it is that some of the underlying src is neat.
Top to bottom, here’s where I’m at:
Reaktor - for when you want to make a musical thing from scratch. It’s modular for actual nerds.
PureData/Max - for when Reaktor won’t do what you want but you still want some kind of visual representation (or you just want to start from first principles).
SonicPi/Supercollider - for when you don’t want/care about a GUI but want to tweak and twerk.
C (sometimes Cmajor if I’m lazy) - for when you absolutely, no holds barred want to fuck with a sound. Nothing beats directly injecting/abusing 44000 individual values every second. Ring buffers ftw.
Assuming I’m decent with those things, I have more tools that 99.999% of the musicians on the planet, and it still doesn’t make me an awesome artist. This shit is interesting to play with but much like one more free plugin, another coding environment isn’t going to be a magic bullet. I think I’m better off refining what I’ve got and trying to put my efforts into actually sitting down and making sounds instead of learning a new syntax that likely won’t turn anything on its head.
I definitely agree with this, but I have to admit that sometimes it’s great (for me, at least) to find more “hands-off” approaches or new ways of seeing things, even if 99% of my prototypes or ideas can easily be done inside of Reaktor, or even the DAW itself.
I’ll never get around to them all either unfortunately, but all of the frontends for Supercollider have been so much fun so far that it’s taking all I have in me not to explore just a little deeper, even if it’s just likely to lead to diminishing returns and stumbling around needlessly.
I definitely think Sonic Pi, Tidal Cycles and possibly even Foxdot at least allow music to continue to flow with as few snags as possible while at least interfacing with the beast that is Supercollider, so I might’ve ended up finding my perfect depth somehwere in the middle as well, without really having to take a deeper plunge. But it’s still very tempting
For sure, I definitely think there’s benefits to alternate perspectives or approaching problems in a different light. What I’m not sure about is the benefit of a similar ‘low level’ audio language/engine verses the amount of time it takes to get familiar with it.
I think this all comes down to workflow. For me, messing with this stuff isn’t generally performative, it’s procedural - I throw a sound into the blender and if anything interesting comes out I cut it out and use it as a sample. I’ve started to think of it as ‘digital musique concrete’, as pretentious as that sounds. I use Ableton for composition which has a ridiculously complete set of tools for musically dicking with sounds and rhythms, so it really doesn’t make a lot of sense to recreate the wheel in other software until it’s something I can’t pull off in a DAW.
My “experiments” usually start with a dumb idea about what happens if you do X to Y. Then I try to fit my mental model of that into my bag of tools. Sometimes that question comes from the tools themselves, like hooking up random shit in Reaktor or PD, and I guess that’s where different frameworks may shine a light on things I haven’t thought about, but more often the ideas are more conceptual than musical, at least to start with (eigenvalues of sample sets as FM carriers, quaternions as simultaneous ‘rotations’ through different domains, and other such nonsense).
So what’s interesting to me from a sound design perspective are the broad X/Y questions and how they’re implemented. For a given framework (ie Supercollider or similar functional programming space), I’m not sure how couching the content in a syntactically different but ultimately similar framework would get me to a different problem space, again at the cost of actually learning that framework. Maybe I’m wrong that these things would expose a whole new set of things to think about, but I only have so much time in my ADD-filled day.
tl;dr - I currently got enough hammers and enough nails, I need to get better at not hitting my thumb.
