Tim's Portfolio

This piece was created using the Phase Vocoder object. The original sound is a 5-second exerpt from "Black Sands" by Bonobo, has been stretched in time to nearly 15 minutes, while preserving frequencies.

This piece demonstrates the use of the Resampler object, which performs sample-rate conversion to change the speed and frequency of an audio stream. The Resampler object exposes a "speed" number input, which in this example, is being changed by a simpler slider control.

Here, the FeedBack object was used, which was an experimental attempt to introduce a closed loop into the audio rendering network. This can be used to allow methods like Karplus-Strong synthesis, and other effects like echoes and reverberations, as heard here. The original song is "Sprout and the Bean" by Joanna Newsom.

To see a screenshot from the recording of this song, click here

To see a screenshot from the recording of this song, click here

Aptly named, this song demonstrates frequency modulation synthesis . In FM synthesis, the frequency of a waveform being played is modulated at a speed comparable to that of the waveform's original frequency. This method can achieve a variety of glassy, metallic and ceramic sounds by changing the waveform and frequencies involved. The creation of this sound involved only a Sampler object and a NoteGen object, plus a variety of number objects to compute the waveforms and modulating functions.

Here, a NoteGen object is used in conjunction with a hand-drawn waveform to implement a wavetable synthesizer. . The timbre of the sound changing is due to the waveform being redrawn, freehandedly, at runtime, by the user. Hand-drawn waveforms turn out to be a very effective way of introducing unique timbres and harmonics. In most off-the-shelf synthesizers, the waveform is typically selected from an immutable list of predefined shapes, but in Flosion, there is no such restriction.

This piece was also made with a hand-drawn wavetable synthesizer. The output of this single-wave synthesizer is then passed to an Ensemble object, which samples its input many times in parallel while providing a random distribution of similar frequencies, and mixes the resulting streams into a single output stream. This adds a tremendous amount of character and spatial immersion to the synthesizer. The resulting sound stream is then passed through a Filter object which applies a band-pass filter. At the start of every note, the filter permits most frequencies through, before descending quickly to allow only bass frequencies. This changes the otherwise rather static sound into something resembling a plucked or struck instrument. In other synthesizers, this is commonly achieved by customizing something called the Attack Decay Sustain Release envelope and a filter which is built in to the synth. In Flosion, this is instead achieved by defining arbitrary functions and wiring them together with Filter objects.