PureData

[Dan]

Anybody 'round here have any experience w/ PureData? It's about the same as Max/MSP, but w/o the pretty GUI and the $400 price tag.

Mainly, I'm looking for good, well-laid out tutorials & examples. I've found a couple that are ok, including an online book, but it seems like there have to be better ones out there.

-Dan.

[poserp]

Mainly, I'm looking for good, well-laid out tutorials & examples. I've found a couple that are ok, including an online book, but it seems like there have to be better ones out there.

-Dan.

From my perspective (I haven't used MAX, but I'm a computer programmer for my day job) I like pd, although it doesn't have much in the way of visual bells and whistles. I think it would be fun for sound processing; IMO it'd require quite a bit of investment in time and energy to use it for synthesis. I'm already familiar with the Kurzweil way of doing things, so I've decided that's the way I'm going to go w.r.t. synthesis (then I only have to learn one paradigm).

I liked the tutorials in the "doc/3.audio.examples" folder included with the pd-extended installation (they go with that online book you mentioned); they helped me get the gist of how pd works and they start with simple stuff and get progressively more complex. Then again, being a programmer I'm cool with text and simple graphics for most things so the included examples worked for me (that's probably also why I get along so well with kurzweil synths). I imagine, though, that much of the pd community is fairly idiosyncratic and so everyone has their own "way" of using it. This, I think, is one of the reasons why there aren't better tutorials out there. What sorts of things do you ultimately want to do with pd?

[Dan]

Broadly, I'd like to use it to learn more about general synthesis, because I know practically nothing about it (particularly granular synthesis) and some/many of the plugin synths separate you from the nuts & bolts of what's actually going on. I like that pd & MAX treat everything as numbers that can pulled from or sent to pretty much anywhere and that they support programming-like logic structures. Conversely, Reason tries to emulate hw synths and keeps MIDI, CV, and audio in their own little sphere.

The first thing I'd like to do is simulate an internal combustion engine. Typically the way engines have been handled in games is to sample a real engine at one or more engine speeds, then use pitch shifting & crossfades to fill in the middle areas - just like a cheap digital piano. This technique works fine if you've got plenty of samples (e.g. every 500 rpm), but if you've only got a couple, then the pitch shifting artifacts are pretty obvious and not convincing. Also, the fundamental sound of the engine firing doesn't really change in pitch as the RMP's increase. Other things change in pitch, while the firing really only happens more frequently.

I'd like to treat the whole thing more like a machine gun with one sample being triggered for each piston cycle/firing, and the "rate of fire" being modulated by the RPM parameter. That'll make up the bulk of the sound, with other things like exhaust, belt whine, fan noise, etc having some pitch shifting applied to them.

-Dan.

[poserp]

The first thing I'd like to do is simulate an internal combustion engine. Typically the way engines have been handled in games is to sample a real engine at one or more engine speeds, then use pitch shifting & crossfades to fill in the middle areas - just like a cheap digital piano. This technique works fine if you've got plenty of samples (e.g. every 500 rpm), but if you've only got a couple, then the pitch shifting artifacts are pretty obvious and not convincing. Also, the fundamental sound of the engine firing doesn't really change in pitch as the RMP's increase. Other things change in pitch, while the firing really only happens more frequently.

I'd like to treat the whole thing more like a machine gun with one sample being triggered for each piston cycle/firing, and the "rate of fire" being modulated by the RPM parameter. That'll make up the bulk of the sound, with other things like exhaust, belt whine, fan noise, etc having some pitch shifting applied to them.
-Dan.

Right on, have you seen this site?

http://obiwannabe.co.uk/tutorials/html/tutorial_machines_intro.html

Check out the whole thing, a big bonus is the tutorials use pd for all the examples, with downloadable files. Not to mention all the stuff about sound design in general.

Edit: there are also audio files of the examples for those who just want to read along.

[Dan]

Right on, have you seen this site?

http://obiwannabe.co.uk/tutorials/html/tutorial_machines_intro.html

Check out the whole thing, a big bonus is the tutorials use pd for all the examples, with downloadable files. Not to mention all the stuff about sound design in general.

Edit: there are also audio files of the examples for those who just want to read along.

Thanks for that. Actually, that guy hangs out at another board which I frequent. I knew he had some pd stuff up, but hadn't checked it out in a while. I forgot how much was there.

-Dan.

[poserp]

I don't know how much into code-monkeying you are, but nvidia's CUDA holds great promise for doing fun things in the audio world. Here's a good geekish intro:

http://www.ddj.com/architect/207200659

Any computer that supports dual video cards could become a dsp powerhouse; until now I've been fairly confident that Kurzweil's custom chips and coding were pretty much the most powerful solution for dsp stuff (i.e., compared to off-the-shelf stuff like Tiger Sharc (the chips that run the Arturia Origin)). CUDA-enhanced audio applications like pd, however, could offer up some pretty stiff competition. Again, there's a whole lot of coding that you'd have to do, but the rewards would probably be worth the effort.

Hopefully, with pd's collaborative development process, there will be real code to play with relatively soon. Incidentally, the iPhone has a gpu although you have to code shaders and such to use it (that won't stop me from trying, but I'm just getting my feet wet in parallel processing/gpu stuff).