Friday, November 20, 2009

A "timbre stretching" example in ChucK

As many of us, professional or hobbyist computer music aficionados, I adore Miller Puckette's freely available book on this science, "The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music". If you are more into the material, you may have noticed that the examples in this book are written (more accurately: "drawn") in Pd, or Pure Data, which is a graphical computer music synthesis environment.

I wanted to try the same concepts in my favourite music language, ChucK, which lead me to the conclusion that it's quite different to create the same concepts in these two environments.

So here's my take on "timbre stretching", which is an interesting approach to radically change a waveform without the use of filters or frequency modulation, whatever.

// "timbre stretching" in a ChucKist way
// by Hillaby

// the sinosc can be replaced by any waveform generator
// in this sample it's only used for one period
SinOsc osc => LiSa lisa => dac;

// modulator will modulate duty cycle
SinOsc modulator => blackhole;

/* in case you want to record it...
lisa => WvOut rec => blackhole;
"lisa.wav" => rec.wavFilename;
*/

// play around with these settings:
100.0 => float fr; // the base frequency
1.3 => modulator.freq; // modulator frequency (keep it low :))
5.0 => float modRate; // modulation rate, the minimum duty cycle will be 1 / (1+2*modRate), maximum: 1

// calculate period and set wave generator frequency
1::second / fr => dur period;
fr => osc.freq;

// record one period and unchuck wave generator
period => lisa.duration;
1 => lisa.record;
lisa.duration() => now;
0 => lisa.record;
osc =< lisa;

// play back recorded period
while (1) {
0::samp => lisa.playPos; // start at 0
1 => lisa.play;

// set rate, 1.0 when duty cycle is maximum
// and 1.0+modrate*2.0 when minimum
1.0 + modRate*(1.0+modulator.last()) => lisa.rate;

// wait until playback terminates (at specified rate)
lisa.duration()/lisa.rate() => now;
0 => lisa.play;

// wait until the "empty part" of the duty cycle passes
period - lisa.duration()/lisa.rate() => now;
}

Sunday, November 15, 2009

La Charanga Habanera in Slovenia!

OK, I have just come back from Vienna from the concert of Pupy y Los Que Son Son, and now I'm planning to travel to Slovenia at the end of this month, because David Calzado y La Charanga Habanera, one of my favourite Cuban bands will perform. The concert dates and places follow:
  • Wednesday, 25. November 2009 - Festivalna dvorana, Ljubljana, Slovenia
  • Thursday, 26. November 2009 - Festivalna dvorana Lent, Maribor, Slovenia
  • Friday, 27. November 2009 - Kresovanje, Sežana, Slovenia
Maribor is only 350 kms from Budapest, that seems to be the closest point of their European tour in autumn '09.

(For my Spanish-speaking friends: las fechas y los lugares de los conciertos en Eslovenia de La Charanga Habanera se pueden encontrar aquí arriba en la lista.)