sonic surrounds

From Peter Mcilwain, via the ACMA mailing list, comes the following news of the Nodal composing tool.

Nodal has been released for OSX and now Windows. Its free and has attracted some interest in the computer music community. For those unfamiliar with Nodal: Nodal is a generative software application for composing music. The software is produced at the Centre for Electronic Media Art (CEMA), Monash University, Australia. It uses a novel method for the notation and playing of MIDI based music. This method is based around the concept of a user-defined graph. The graph consists of nodes (musical events) and edges (connections between events). The composer interactively defines the graph, which is then traversed by any number of virtual players that play the musical events as they encounter them on the graph. The time taken by a player to travel from one node to another is based on the length of the edges that connect the nodes.

here’s a screenshot of the Pd interface that I developed to perform for Electrofringe 2006.

click on the image for full sized version:

I made heavy use of the (now quite usable) Graph on Parent feature - so that I could instantiate abstraction subpatches that created each of those GUI blocks in the patch.

Blocks aren’t really well labeled in this screenshot, but from left to right, top to bottom, these are the abstractions I developed and used in the patch:

• on the first row:
• a timer (clock), so i know how long i’ve been playing
• a “heartbeat” synth i made which emits a nice low bass pulse
• then three instances of the same ambisonic audio file player (that plays back my 4 channel ambisonic field recordings, and decodes them to 5 channel surround format)
• a single instance of a stereo audio file player
• on the second row:
• two instances of my 5 channel granulator - based on an improved version of the stereo granulator i’ve released elsewhere on my website
• a surround glitch/pop generator based on filtered single sample impulses with controlled stochastic triggering and panning
• and on the final row:
• a CPU load meter
• DSP switch
• mixer for all the abstractions, grouped into foreground and background sounds
• and the 5 channel output and recorder - which was the last thing i implemented, and seemed unreliable, so i didn’t use it to record my performance live. i’ll record a version sometime soon.