When I discovered electronic music during the Centre Acanthes 2000/Ircam, my favorite topic was real time sound processing in frequency domain. Hans Tutschku taught the wonders of AudioSculpt in Avignon, before Benjamin Thigpen taught Max/MSP in Helsinki.
Now, the Computer Music Journal just published an article I wrote about spectral sound processing in real time and performance time (whereas real-time treatments are applied on a live sound stream, performance-time treatments are transformations of sound files that are generated during a performance). If you are interested in graphical sound synthesis, phase vocoder, and sonograms (or spectrograms), I hope you will enjoy this tutorial.
The great news is that you can download the article for free on the page of the Computer Music Journal, Issue 32, Volume 3.
Max/MSP/Jitter patches
You can readily apply the described techniques in the development environment Max/MSP/Jitter. For a hands-on approach, make sure you download the patches on my cycling74 share page (link updated 01/12/2010).
By the way, here is Petsi Pies in Cambridge, a coffee-shop in which I spent time writing this article:
Outline of the article
- Spectral Sound Processing with Graphical Interaction
- Non-Real-Time Tools
- Real-Time Environments
- An Extended Phase Vocoder
- FFT Data in Matrices
- Interacting with a Sonogram
- Recording
- Playback
- Advanced Playback
- Removing the “Frame Effect”
- Transient Preservation
- Segmentation
- Graphically Based Transformations
- Direct Transformations
- Masks
- Interaction of Sounds
- Mosaicing
- Real-Time Freeze and Beyond
- Real-Time Freeze
- Automatic Cross-Fade
- Melody to Harmony
