Reasons seem obvious to try and create sound, and eventually echo nature’s own sounds, imprinting our human characteristics onto this reflection of nature. First through voice, percussions, and later with growing sophistication music instruments, then digital processors, that today allows a handling of massive amounts of information and processing.
Great sounds are created from this paradigm, ones that couldn’t have been created never before these recent times. Ever growing technology (and sound technology with it) makes it possible to synthesize practically any sound the designer can imagine, bounded by its own cultural and personal constraints.
Technology enables creators to produce any sound based on detailed physical aspects, phenomena and numbers. Superposing layers of sonic events until finishing an always-incomplete piece of work. (Winter, 2005)
Modern sound processing software MAX MSP, a powerful tool created, developed and distributed by Cycling 74 (Cycling’74, 2011), is used for this project. The reason behind it is its great flexibility and power to do pretty much any kind of sound processing, connections and programming, as it is based on the structure of a common object oriented programming language, providing logical core coding in its structure.
MAX MSP is basically a visual Integrated Developing Environment (IDE) that is focused on processing of audio. Thanks to its property of being visual, pieces of functional code, such as sinusoidal oscillators, are dragged in the working canvas, and connected with other functional bits of the program, with the goal of arranging them into complex structures or systems, mostly tailored to specific applications.
Not just music is programmed into MAX MSP, but other applications, mostly artistic can be experimented with it, or have been. Things than can be done with this software lie within the grounds of arts, music and acoustic scientific development.
Applications like mentioned above vary from simple processes of filtering, playback control, to much more sophisticated proceedings, that can include data Sonification, sound Spatialization, and acoustics testing, measurements and experiments.
Complex acoustic phenomena can be simulated used tailored programs coded in MAX/MSP, and its big community means that it is a progressive package, growing in popularity, complexity and with new resources available online from and for the users. Although MAX/MSP is not free, it has just dropped its price (Cycling’74, 2011), and announcing the launching of newest version 6, and there is plenty of free online material to use as toolboxes or standalones applications, all based on MAX MSP, with some aid of Java Script.
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Further on this chapter:
0. CONTENT
2.1 SONIFICATION
2.1.1 SONIFICATION DEFINITIONS AND CONCEPTS
2.2 SPATIALIZATION
2.2.1 ACOUSTICS INVOLVED IN SPATIALIZATION
2.2.1.1 COORDINATES SYSTEM
2.2.1.2 DELAY AND GAIN
2.2.1.3 REFLECTIONS
2.2.1.4 SOUND ACQUIREMENT
2.2.2 SPATIALIZATION TECHNIQUES
2.2.2.1 ViMiC
2.2.2.1.1 BASIC FUNCTIONING
2.2.2.2 JAMOMA
2.2.2.2.1 VIMIC MODULES
2.2.2.2.2 OUTPUT MODULES