Sample library Producer | Composer

Recently I have been working with Lawrie Cape a rather talented Flash designer who is also involved in Actionscript, Design, Games and Programming. Following a number of conversations about generative audio, sound design and building our own interfaces to control audio, we have decided upon a couple of projects to undertake. The first is to create some kind of generative audio system that whilst being random, still contains repetition in a musically pleasing fashion. Please take a look at Lawrie’s Blog for more on this.

The second was to design some kind of interface which would enable you to record an audio sample and have control of its playback speed. This idea was taken from the coffee grinder instrument in the following video.

FINE COLLECTION OF CURIOUS SOUND OBJECTS from Georg Reil on Vimeo.

Quite an interesting piece right?

So on this idea we have decided that our interface would work in the same way as the coffee grinder, however we are going to try and use an exercise bike as the turning mechanism instead.

With all this in mind then I have begun delving into Pure Data, an open source piece of software which uses graphical modular coding, very similar to Max/Msp. I have built a software interface which allows you to control audio in a similar way to the video project above but with MIDI control. Once we get a chance to look at building the physical interface I shall revisit the software interface to suit.

For now though it seems to work quite nicely as a stand alone patch. You can either load audio into the looper via the file browser or you can record straight into the looper.

You can download the patch here and you’ll also need to get Pure Data, which is free at http://puredata.info/. You’ll need to make sure that you’re audio interface and MIDI control settings are setup right within pure data before the patch will work but after that the interface is notated to show you how to use it.

Hope you enjoy it!