Pulsar Granulation Help
Hi there,
I'm currently undertaking a rather large Max/MSP project for university, i am building a synthesizer that offers various audio sources and manipulation, hopefully cleverly integrated with an intuitive UI.
As i need something quite complex, i have been steered toward including a granulator.
I am currently in the research stage, reading Microsound (Curtis Roads) currently, and from what i know so far the most musical (and also complex for the purposes of this 3rd year project) implementation appears to be using pulsar trains.
I've looked through the max help patches, read around the forums and had previously decided on using an external object for the granulation.
So my questions;
What is the best way to implement pulsar granulation with a high level of user control?
Is this the best option musically? As this source will be mixed and modulated along with traditional oscillators.
Is this possible working with user defined samples, as well as preset wavetables?
Any help is much appreciated :)
Regards, Jay
Hi Maxted,
If you want your pulsar synthesis to be faithful to Curtis Road's famous implementation, then the main job in max is not really the synthesis but building the user interface. I did something like this some time ago and found Emmanuel Jourdan's ej.function object to be really helpful, since it allows you to draw detailed fundamental, formant, amplitude and spatialisation envelopes with curves. Like all synthesis techniques, the so-called 'pulsaret' can be any arbitrary waveform, 'sampled', drawn, a sine wave etc. I'm not sure what you mean when you refer to using an external for the granulation. Unless it actually does pulsar synthesis then I can't see where it would fit into the architecture of PS. I would recommend having a look at the train~ and trapezoid~ objects for ideas. Good luck!
Hi
there was a very recent thread, kind of related to this (UI parameter control of grain window pulses),
not sure if it's directly related to pulse train granulation though (I have yet to read Microsound tsk tsk); the result is pasted below:
Brendan
The second example is the basic idea, the duration between pulses and the pulsaret width need to be independent of one another. In the example the original poster could stick a wave~ under the trapezoid~, that way you can have whatever waveform you want in there.
When you design detailed curves for each parameter you can get really interesting, jagged timbres, but because you are working on such small timescales - usually about 1-2 seconds - the challenge is avoiding loops...
I am busy with this subject too.
Here's what I've come up with so far.