TTEM's Example 3.16

(We now resume this blog, after a few days out with a cold.)

This morning, I got example 3.16 (from TTEM) wired up and working. (I believe the examples from TTEM and the PD examples (i.e. that ship with the program) are one and the same, so I wouldn't have had to wire it up myself, except I wanted to get my hands dirty putting something together.)

The first thing I noticed was how nicely expressive it is, compared to my beginner's "notein->mtof->osc~" patch I had been using. 3.16 gives a little buzz at higher key velocities, has a similar volume at the higher pitches as it does at the lower, and fades quite satisfyingly when you lift the key.

Now I just need to go through the text and understand better how it works. I get most of the top two-thirds, but get a little fuzzy below the phasor~, with all the *~'s and the cos~'s and all. Sounds like my next mini-task, (before I figure out how to wire 3.16 up for polyphony).

Theory and Technique of Electronic Music

Having gotten PD to hear MIDI from my keyboard and play my very simple patch, my next thought was to figure out how to get polyphony out of PD.

PD is a pretty low-level softsynth. It gives you the basics, like oscillators and D/A converters, but beyond that, you wire them up to suit your needs. Kinda like being given a box of tubes, resistors and capacitors and being told you can build your own stereo. Hence my need to "figure out polyphony". I'm doing so because a) once you figure it out (and it doesn't look to be that hard, really), you can do pretty much anything you want, and b) I'm a geek.

So my next step was to dust off (figuratively speaking) my copy of TTEM, known also as "The Theory and Technique of Electronic Music", by Miller Puckette. On the one hand, TTEM is (if not "over my head") a lot of complex stuff about synthesizing sound, but wrapped around the math and theory is explanations of how to do stuff with PD. Like sampling, reverb and polyphony.

Having read TTEM pretty much cover to cover a year or so ago, I'm just skimming over things, and heading for the practical, and this morning, I stopped and got halfway through understanding example 3.16, which looks like a more complete MIDI patch.

Puredata and MIDI

I fired up Puredata (PD) yesterday, pulled up my first (and only) attempt at putting a MIDI-controlled patch together, and for some reason, it wasn't hearing MIDI. So this morning, I troubleshot it.

Turns out that under the Media menu, PD remembered that I use OSS for sound output, and that I had default-MIDI selected, but didn't remember the MIDI devices that I was using, so when I pulled up the "MIDI settings..." dialog, it showed "none" for the input and output device. First time through, I tried switching to ALSA and back, and I seem to recall somehow that worked, but as I write this up, it leaves the MIDI devices blank. Anyway, when I set them both to "OSS MIDI device #1", it works just fine.

Back to Music

Time for another run at creating music. I play keyboards barely at a beginner's level, guitar barely at a beginner's level, and have a tolerable understanding of what they teach in the first two semesters of college level theory. I've wanted to do something with all that, but for various reasons, get discouraged in short order and put it back on the shelf.

I have a decade-old Takamine acoustic guitar, a several-year-old Casio keyboard, and MIDI cables connecting the keyboard to my Linux box. I have Rosegarden and PureData/PD installed (among other things like Hydrogen and I think FreeBase), but have done very little with any of them.

So anyway, this blog will chronicle what I'm doing. I hope to use it to share what I'm learning, in theory, gear, software and the mental processes that I'm using to make beautiful (ahem) music.