ElasticAudio X

Tim Kleinert

dear friends,

Here's the final version of the polyphonic elastic audio synth. It offers vastly improved sound quality and precision, plus added functionality like forcing audio material to a specific pitch and controlling formants.

This design differs from the polyphonic granular synth in a fundamental way: The granular approach chops up the source audio arbitrarily into grains which clock at a specific frequency. Since these grains overlap, there is always some phase cancellation in the resulting audio which has to be alleviated by jittering the playback speed of the individual grains. Also, the grain clock bleeds into the audio considerably, and also has to be masked by jitter.

This approach works totally differently. It intelligently scans the source audio for single full wavecycles, clusters those into larger chunks of selectable size and realigns them over the time axis -all in realtime. Cool

Hence, all the artefacts (or interesting effects, depending on your taste Laughing

) of the granular approach don't occur and the pitch information of the source audio is preserved far more faithfully.

I also added something completely new: "forcing to pitch". When this function is engaged, the audio is indeed "forced" onto a pitch of choice. Technically speaking, the waveform clusters are hardsynced to a carrier wave, and the sharp flanks are smoothed away. When this is activated, the cluster pitch control actually changes into a formant control -so pitch, time and formants are all controllable in realtime. Cool

There's a demo mp3 attached, which demonstrates my voice saying "one two three..." (sorry Laughing

), playing some notes on the keyboard and stepping through the 8 variations.

Input Section:
INPUT Source, Pad -select external input channel and pad
INPUT Monitor -listen to the input (running through the input limiter, drive and EQ)
SAMPLE Capture -samples audio (2.7 seconds)
INPUT Limiter -input dynamics
INPUT Drive -overdrive for the input, can be useful
INPUT EQ -EQ for the input, can be useful to add eg. "air" to voices

Elastic Audio Section:
SAMPLE Positio -position pointer in the sampl; also assigned to modwheel (for scrubbing the sample)
SAMPLE Speed -playback speed: from -64 (backwards) to 0 (freeze) to 64 (forwards), independent of pitch; assigned to the pitch stick (for cruising through the sample)
SPEED KBT -lets playback speed track the keyboard
SAMPLE Pitch -playback pitch of the sample, independent of speed;When pitch-forcing is activated, this parameter turns into a formant control.
PITCH KBT -sample pitch keyboard tracking
CLUSTER Size -sets the size of the wave cluster
CL-SIZE Source -this is a nifty one: when set to "cycles", the "CLUSTER Size" parameter determines the amount of single wavecycles to be clustered (when set to 0, this equals 1 wavecycle, which lets you scan through the individual waveforms of your source audio with the pitch stick. It's fun, try it.) When set to "time" however, the "CLUSTER Size" parameters determines the absolute temporal size (=time) of the cluster. This results in an uniform cluster size regardless of playback pitch.

PITCH forcing -activates the pitch forcing function
WAVE smoothing -amount of smoothing applied to the pitch-forced waveforms
FORCED PITCH Coarse, Fine -destination pitch

POSITION Jitter -jitters the sample position
PITCH Jitter -jitters the sample playback pitch
CL-SIZE Jitter -jitters the cluster size ("time" mode will logically render this ineffective)
F-PITCH Jitter -jitters the destination pitch of the pitch-forcing process

The rest is vanilla stuff -filter, amp envelope, chorus, stereo delay, reverb, blablabla.

As usual, this patch uses a DSP per voice, so 3 voices for unexpanded and 7 for expanded G2s.

Also, this patch uses 3 interslot buses!

yupp, that's it. Enjoy. Smile

best,
tim

The demo mp3 demonstrating the 8 variations:
1 - straightforward sample playback, freeze with the pitch stick
2 - freeze with some jitter, cruising about with the pitch stick
3 - force-pitch tonal pad
4 - glitchy warble (big clusters with copious pitch jitter)
5 - slowly scanning single wavecycles
6 - fixed force-pitch with keyboard-tracking formant control
7 - warbling cloud
8 - force-pitch pad with extreme formants

OneTwoThree.mp3

Description:

audio demo of the ElasticAudioX patch; sampled voice saying "one two three...", noodling around and stepping through the 8 variations.

Download (listen)

Filename:

OneTwoThree.mp3

Filesize:

2.31 MB

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2636 Time(s)

ElasticAudioX_TK.pch2

Description:

Final version of the polyphonic elastic audio synthesizer. Vastly improved algorithm, better sound quality, more functionality.

Download (listen)

Filename:

ElasticAudioX_TK.pch2

Filesize:

8.47 KB

Downloaded:

2563 Time(s)

seraph · Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 12:56 am Post subject:

unexplainable but awesome Exclamation

iPassenger · Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 2:29 am Post subject:

Yet again its amazing tim, nice work.. Haven't loaded it up yet (at work) but the demo sounds brill.

drapdap · Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 3:28 am Post subject:

the demo is so funny, i listened three times by now...
Tim, we're so glad you are. Smile

biggest possible thank you!

robert

mtvic · Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 4:35 am Post subject:

Sounds like Konky the Robot from Pee Wees' Playhouse.
Very useful fun pch

v-un-v · Posted: Thu Mar 26, 2009 7:49 am Post subject:

No wonder Clavia have discontinued the G2! Shocked

This is f**king tapped (probably quite literally too eh?) Tim!!

You are a genius mate Very Happy

Oh yes Clavia- they have probably realised from your patches alone why it was so silly to leave out sampling on the G2, and why sampling will now appear on the G3........Hooray!! Well just a thought! Cool

And thanks for uploading that mp3 too! Exclamation