Category: sonicArts

Listening List 1 Michel Chion: Requiem – Dies Irae, 1978 John Chowning: Stria (1978) Brian Eno: Unfamiliar Wind (Leeks Hill), 1978 – 82 Jonty Harrison: Klang (1982) Jonathan Harvey: Mortuos Plango, Vivos Vocos (1980) Paul Lansky: Six Fantasies on a Poem by Thomas Campion – Her Reflection (1978 – 79) György Ligeti: Artikulation (1958) John Tenney: Collage #1 ‘Blue Suede’ (1961) A zip…

Creativity We need to distinguish between creativity and composition. Creativity is best thought of as a trait and practice that applies to many domains and activities. Composition is a specific creative domain, or practice. Creativity can be learned. If one doesn’t believe that, then the teaching and studying of composition is somewhat pointless. For our purposes, then, the…

A quick run-down of the Granulator module in Cecilia4. The Granulator module performs time expansion/compression and pitch shifting, but unlike the FilterWarper, the Granulator does not focus on a smooth and transparant output. The output features more amplitude fluctuation and some degree of irregularity in the procession of grains in time. You can also create…

If you want to do simple time and pitch changes on an audio file, use the FilterWarper module. Launch Cecilia4. The editor window opens. Close the editor window, and under the File menu, choose Modules > Time > FilterWarper. The FilterWarper is designed to produce the smoothest time and pitch shifting of any granular operator…

I’ll explain a bit more about using the FilterWarper and Granulator in other posts. For now, the basics of getting started with Cecilia 4. As with all new audio programs that you run, first check the preferences under the Cecilia menu. The odd aspect of Cecilia is that you don’t want to choose Core Audio…

Reverb allows one to create a sense of depth in music. Controlling the dry (unprocessed) to wet (processed) balance can be used to move a sound from the near field (dry) to distant (reverberant). For maximum flexibility you want to use an aux track for your reverb so that you can control dry and wet…

We will be using Cecilia (version 4) for granular synthesis processing. You can download it for free for either Mac OS X or Windows at its project page on Google Code: http://code.google.com/p/cecilia4/ Cecilia is a graphical front end that uses Csound to process audio. Csound is a text-based language that is beyond what we want…

Equalization and Filtering The difference between equalization (EQ) and filtering is generally one of amount and purpose. Since EQ is form of filtering, I’m going to explain filters first. Filters A general definition for a filter is anything that changes the gain of frequencies in a sound. This definition is so general it is useless,…