Not been on in a while, so be good to get exchanging ideas again

I am about to start a project on Procedural Audio, and I will be making alien weapons in Max/msp without the need for audio files.

So does anybody have any ideas how I should go about making an alien weapon sound? Maybe someone knows of a particular synth?

alien-weapon

Well first of all who has ever heard the sound of an alien weapon? ;-)

But seriously there's going to be some inherent creativity involved with creating the sounds of things that don't exist. What I would do is listen to some sounds from games that have aliens and hear what kind of sound design they've got going on. The Halo franchise comes to mind.

Also, Andy Farnell's book "Designing Sound" is all about creating procedural audio sound effects using Pd. I don't have it in front of me at the moment to see if he has a section on aline weapons.

I suggest a forum search for Drum Synthesis as a starting point for your Alien gun SFX...

https://cycling74.com/search-results/?q=drum%20synthesis%20

Obviously these would create some old school sounding alien zaps but you didn't go into much detail on how contemporary you want your alien gun sfx to be.

I'd approach this like any other sound design task: Break it down into component parts and a nice solid backstory. Invent an alien overlord race - what would their tech be?

You can get some really wild sounds by combining sig~ rate and gizmo~, both at opposite extremes (really fast but transposed way low, or vice versa). If you don't want to use previous audio files, maybe draw some buffers using waveform~ to start. Some long, draw-out ones might be good for "alien gun reverb" ;)

You can get some really wild sounds by combining sig~ rate and gizmo~, both at opposite extremes (really fast but transposed way low, or vice versa). If you don't want to use previous audio files, maybe draw some buffers using waveform~ to start. Some long, draw-out ones might be good for "alien gun reverb"  ;)


start with old school-- envelope modulated freq with filtered noise:

start with old school-- envelope modulated freq with filtered noise:
(hours of fun)


For procedural stuff like this it's also a good idea to use [random] or [noise~] to add minor changes to pitch and modulation for each shot. This mimics some of the natural fluctuations of real-world objects.

I read somewhere that in its latter years one of the Radiophonic Workshop's 'secret weapons' was a Yamaha TX816, so FM might be a good place to start.

Start with the Simple FM patch and make it less simple, or for inspiration have a look at the X.FM patch in the Examples/Synths,

I read somewhere that in its latter years one of the Radiophonic Workshop's 'secret weapons' was a Yamaha TX816, so FM might be a good place to start.
 Start with the Simple FM patch and make it less simple, or for inspiration have a look at the X.FM patch in the Examples/Synths,
Cheers
Roger


Cheers guys, plenty to think about and research!

I have farnells book yes, but having a couple of issues transposing his pd files into max files.

I have been considering making an FM Synth to generate the sounds, with the inclusion of [random]/[noise~]

Thanks again for the help, will keep you posted

The X.fm synth produces some great sounds, but is there no simpler way of producing these sounds?

http://www.moz.ac.at/sem/lehre/lib/pd-sounddesign/index.html

Maybe you like that: http://www.moz.ac.at/sem/lehre/lib/pd-sounddesign/index.html


Alien Weapon