Working on a 60-second audio art project with SWMBO.
She's wrote the text and recorded the voice track, I'll be editing and adding sound effects and ambient sound, using Audacity.
Some of the tracks are generated using a virtual modular synthesizer, VCV Rack - totally free, for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Screenshots of the patches I came up with:
This patch sounds like a swarm of bees. Eight different triangle wave oscillators that are close in frequency, but not harmonically related, and which slowly rise and fall a bit in frequencies.
This one produces clicks at random intervals, like a geiger counter. It started out as a wind chime effect for a different project.
This one produces a drone-like Asus4 chord, with 16 different notes that slowly rise and fall in volume independently.
It's meant to provide a dream-like atmospheric ambience.
By right-clicking on an unoccupied area of the rack, you get a huge library of other modules you can add.
The interface is modelled after traditional analog modular synthesizers. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_synthesizer .
My first contact with modular synthesizers was in Art College back in the '70s when a roommate managed to borrow a Mini-Moog, a Moog Sonic 6, and an Arp 2600 from the Dalhousie University Experimental Music Lab for the weekend. He gave us a brief tutorial on how they work, and in about an hour all four of us pretty much had them figured out.
The ARP 2600 was my favourite, being a miracle of user interface design. The keyboard is optional.
They look complicated, but forty-five years later I could still remember how they work, and used the same principles in VCV Rack. This is good, because the VCV Rack documentation is rather sketchy and assumes you already know how real-world modular synthesizers work.
She's wrote the text and recorded the voice track, I'll be editing and adding sound effects and ambient sound, using Audacity.
Some of the tracks are generated using a virtual modular synthesizer, VCV Rack - totally free, for Mac, Windows, and Linux.
Screenshots of the patches I came up with:
This patch sounds like a swarm of bees. Eight different triangle wave oscillators that are close in frequency, but not harmonically related, and which slowly rise and fall a bit in frequencies.
This one produces clicks at random intervals, like a geiger counter. It started out as a wind chime effect for a different project.
This one produces a drone-like Asus4 chord, with 16 different notes that slowly rise and fall in volume independently.
It's meant to provide a dream-like atmospheric ambience.
By right-clicking on an unoccupied area of the rack, you get a huge library of other modules you can add.
The interface is modelled after traditional analog modular synthesizers. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modular_synthesizer .
My first contact with modular synthesizers was in Art College back in the '70s when a roommate managed to borrow a Mini-Moog, a Moog Sonic 6, and an Arp 2600 from the Dalhousie University Experimental Music Lab for the weekend. He gave us a brief tutorial on how they work, and in about an hour all four of us pretty much had them figured out.
The ARP 2600 was my favourite, being a miracle of user interface design. The keyboard is optional.
They look complicated, but forty-five years later I could still remember how they work, and used the same principles in VCV Rack. This is good, because the VCV Rack documentation is rather sketchy and assumes you already know how real-world modular synthesizers work.
We could be Heroes, just for one day.
- David Bowie -