quantum compressor (inspired by quantum physics)
Hello,
I'm Paul a design student from Paris. (excuse my english)
This semester we work with some scientists (in quantum physics).
In my project I want to illustrated some of the effects of quantum physics with sounds. One of these is the quantification. This theory says that the elementary particles have levels of energy with no continuity between them. For exemple, if your car was quantum it's can go 50mph, 70mph and then 90mph. So with you're quantum car you can't go to 91mph. If you accelerate your car will jump from 50ph to 70mph. It's called the quantum jumping (like teleportation).
Come back to max,
My analogy with the sound: When I play guitar I have an infinity of levels, depending of the way I play. What if I have just 3 or 4 different volumes? Like a strange compressor. If I just pick one note it will decrease slowly. With the Quantum Compressor the volume of the note will hold and drop to another volume with no transition (I draw a little explanation because I'm limited by my english level to explain my idea).
If someone can help me it could be great. I'm not a Max killer I get it one week ago. I don't know where to start.
Bye
Paul
Well, this sounds like the principle of quantization in digital audio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantization_%28signal_processing%29
what you explained is what actually happens during the A/D conversion. What you want is to reduce the bit resolution.
There's an example patch called gen~.bitcrush in the examples/gen/ folder that might inspire you.
it's a bit more involved than that, since they're arbitrary stages, in a sense.
A compressor where the curve is freely adjustable is the closest to what's asked, I think - staircased makes it bitcrushy, and then you can adjust the attack/decay between the levels.
I've tried to do something like this (arbitrary volume transform) but I never got it working properly...
here's a basic version
I just rolled this one, by expanding the above - uses function and lookup~ - It's a lot of fun, but man, it's not exactly a straight transform...
anyway, I threw in a staircased preset, which sounds really good, and I like the scaling I did on the slide~ parameters, too:
Hope you guys can use this.