Pure Data (pd)

Here you'll find some of the tools I developed for Pure Data (http://www.puredata.org/), a powerful open source audio/video dataflow software. An outdated copy of this page can be found on the official Pure Data site (http://www.puredata.org/Members/AlbertoZ). If, for any reason you find the tools on this page useful and you want to offer me a beer please have a look at the bottom of the page.

~cffm~

, or cross-fedback frequency modulation is a technique to get interesting noisy and un-harmonic sounds out of it. See it in action:

The above video has been taken in linux running pd_l2ork. SInce then, purr_data became available and it is now my favourite pd distribution. The patch is available here.  

~moduLaRe~

~moduLaRe~ is mainly a personal tool for processing live flute sound in a creative way, but at the end it became something interesting that I think is worth sharing. The tool is based on work done by other people, in particular on a patch by Stephen Christopher Stamper (and other, please see the acknowledgements in the user manual within the download archive). I’m mostly interested to the flute, but in principle it should work with any input provided. ~moduLaRe~ is conceived as a “live performance” tool: my set-up is composed by a laptop, a midi keyboard, a microphone and a Korg NanoKontrol. The NanoKontrol allows the player to interact with the instrument easily and minimizes the use of mouse, giving much more freedom when interacting with a musical instrument. The computer keyboard is used for controlling the patch parameters as well. The user has 4 possible inputs/controls: pc keyboard, MIDI keyboard, Korg NanoKontrol and microphone. Controllers are connected on the audio board and to the PC. Note that even without the Nanocontrol and midi keyboard still microphone and pc keyboard provide useful inputs. The following is a block diagram of audio flow within ~moduLaRe~ :

The following is the user interface:

How does it sounds? You can find two examples here: http://soundcloud.com/albertoz/s1 and http://soundcloud.com/albertoz/variations-on-greensleeves .  Get  ~moduLaRe~ archive here (v 0.11, aug 26, 2012). Please read the instructions first.  Feedback, improvements, suggestions are welcome. If you find any bug please send me an e-mail. 

Granitique!

A granular instrument built around the granule~ external by Eric Lyon (part of Lyon Potpourri collection of externals for MAX and pd). Granitique is a two voices granular synthesis toy that generates textures of sounds. The two voices can be mixed together. The sounds vary from random, slow grains, similar to wind chimes to crowded clouds of sounds remembering insects, to sounds remembering falling water. Granule is a granular synthesis module reading from a stored waveform in a buffer, it's interesting how flexible it is! Have a look at the readme.pdf within the Download Pack for more information.

OuterSpace

OuterSpace is an "instrument" for PD aimed to the generation of ambient sounds and textures. The instrument is based on white noise filtered by a bank of 128 (!) band-pass filters spread across the audio spectrum. Each filter contributes to the overall sound as an independent "voice", in total 128 voices. Each voice has a "quartic" attack and decay amplitude envelope triggered independently. Each voice is then placed in the stereo field and rotated from left to right following a low frequency oscillator (LFO), plus some spread. The left and right output are then catched and summed up in mixing buses. The output is reverberated using freeverb~. A sample of OuterSpace generated audio is in the Music page. The old, v0.9, version is here together with an mp3 sample of OuterSpace presets and some doc. Enjoy OuterSpace and leave me a feedback if you like! NOTE: using all 128 filters can be heavy on CPU. Minimum requirement should be 2.0 GHz machine. Processing power on my AMD 2400+ CPU (2002) is ~ 50% for 128 voices active.

 Win32 port of "LyonPotpourry" externals

I ported the great Eric Lyon's LyonPoutpourry externals for Win 32. They are here: http://www.sarc.qub.ac.uk/~elyon/LyonSoftware/Pd/

Colored Noise Generator

This abstraction implements an algorithm for the generation of "colored" noise (white, pink, brown...) by varying a continuous parameter that represents the slope of the spectral density in a log(PSD)-log(f) (linear) plot. May be useful for synthesis of noise with predominantly low frequency like rumbles, winds etc. Grab the zip package here: https://puredata.info/Members/AlbertoZ/ColoredNoise/

Drunk Sines

A bank of harmonic oscillators driven in frequency by random walk. Find it here. See how drunked a sine wave could be! Sample 

A little, basic tutorial about externals in Windows using MinGW

Find it here.

You can if you wish make a small donation to help buy a beer on friday

This software is released 'As Is'. It may contain bugs and/or missing features.