Weekend projects

I got four (4!!) new pedal kits in the mail the other day. This week i'm set to build a Big Muff clone, a tri-boost, phaser and an overdrive. Ok, it will probably take me more like a month to get it all built, but in any case, i'm pretty excited about it.

I've started writing five songs in bits and pieces. I think it all started out as one song but began to scatter out into more like 3, or 5. We'll see. It will be fun to put together some of the stuff i'm building with some of this stuff i'm writing. Though it would be nice to have a collaborator or two.

Aside from that, I'm still working on putting together the Felted Signal Processing site, with an inaugural email to follow after it comes together and goes live. It's hard to get all this stuff done while working 60-80hrs/week at my current freelance job.

In other news, myself + three other awesome girls signed the lease on a new studio space in the East Village, only a couple blocks from my house. After I'm done with rga, I'll be over there full-time, working on web + other kinds of design projects. We are currently operating under the name Aplural. I like it.

felted signal processing update

Originally uploaded by 0x000000

I finally figured out how i want to house the hardware. For a little while I thought about placing all of it in a felted box, but decided to go with a kind of flat, felted surface for working on. It feels more natural to work over a flat surface than to try to literally reconstruct a stomp box.

More pictures available over here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/reizorlove/sets/72157604101032880/

thesis update

It's been quiet on the home front here, but the end is drawing near (2 more weeks before the final presentation on 5/7, to be exact), and there is quite a lot to update.

This project has changed a lot since its conception, but many new ideas and potential future project concepts have sprung up along the way, and I am pretty pleased with how the project at hand is shaping up.

The original plan was to embed circuitry in felt itself... something I am still interested in exploring. I wanted to design felted audio signal processing circuits that would accept an analog signal in and output it back out after running through a series of filters.

I am near completing a similar project, only I decided to begin the research from a simpler place, working my way up the ladder of experimentation.

Having said that, felted signal processing has become a set of analog signal processing circuits consisting of a chorus effect, delay effect, tremolo effect, and finally, distortion effect. The processing circuits live on pcbs instead of within the felt itself, reassigning the felt's role from circuit board to soft potentiometer. The felt is directly integrated into the hardware, allowing the user to tranform various stages of the processing circuits as the audio signal passes through the mix of natural wool and steel wool.

For example, with the tremolo circuit, there are two felted objects. One controls the rate of the tremolo, while the other controls the depth. There are also two hardware pots available for setting the initial rate/depth. The felted pots offer expressive control over base settings that the user can dial in with the hard pots, for the purpose of introducing some constants to the system. The hardware pots can also be turned all the way down, leaving the signal processing to as much instability and momentary control as desired by the user. The goal is to set a fixed range over which the felt can distort the sound.

Each effect is daisy chained to itself and may be turned on or off within the chain by a switch. However, after I have all the effects and felted controllers finished, I plan on building a 3x3 resistor mixing matrix, that will provide multiple opportunities for feedback, amplification, and attenuation of the signal. Instead of each effect simply being daisy-chained to one another, they will be tied to various nodes in a 9-celled square, each node have 2 or 4 possible routes it can travel down. It opens the the doors up to all kinds of silliness, for sure.

feedback/delay katzen

original snd:
mew, mew!

and fubar'd sound (delay over two channels with feedback):
ch 1: 2ms, ch2: 50ms
both ch: 2ms
both ch: 10ms
ch1: 110ms, ch2: 100ms
variation, ch1: 110ms, ch2: 100ms
both ch: 125ms
variation, both ch: 125ms
ch1: 240ms, ch2: 250ms
ch1: 300ms, ch2: 250ms
both ch: 500ms
both ch: 1500ms
ch1: 1750ms, ch2: 3500ms
both ch: 4000ms
both ch: 5000ms

snd particles

my max patch:


individual 3 millisecond sound bits at varying frequencies:
50Hz
220Hz
1000Hz
4000Hz
10000Hz

sequences of sound bits at various frequencies and playing for various durations:
5 and 10 millisecond
1 millisecond
3 millisecond
5 millisecond
10 millisecond

feltedsignalprocessing.com

I just created a new space for the home of my felted audio filters. It's in development as you read, but for now I have a little page with a little description holding down the fort:

http://www.feltedsignalprocessing.com (in a new window)

img noise

becomes

this noise from one pass through the img

and

after 10 passes through the img

This is a very stripped down image analysis. I'm just converting the rgb value of each pixel into either a -1, 0, or 1, and then sending it into a buffer. I have a phasor object that takes a second to tween from one sample to the next, hence the rhythmic nature of the noise. These two mp3s are only playing blue and green values.

it ended up sounding like a dot matrix printer... more experiments to come.