Sound designers write out of time. They don’t belong to a place or a style. Most of the time they have to build their own timbre or instrument. Their sound-making limit is only their imagination.
Slowly building up from the previous lessons, the task is now to creatively combine the elements learned so far. To do so, one must accompany the learning of new objects and their technical and practical application in a patcher along with some important observations.
Imagine we were to create a sonic composition. We should make sure we can actually create the basic structures for composition, that is timbre, melody, chords. With the elements learned so far, you can already do that, but it sounds very mechanical and it seems quite hard to make it flexible and rich as if playing a real instrument. Lesson 4 is designed to give you these new elements of Max syntax to be able to smooth out your coding and make it more effective and functional to composing sound.
Timbre
The basic idea we learned from Synthesis is that the more harmonic content to a sound the richer its timbre. So far, by adding several oscillators together, or practicing with the new modulation effects, you have learned how to expand the harmonic content of a sound. In this section, we maintain this and add only one more concept: that sound components might not remain stable during a sound, and when they are unstable, different, changing, they might produce the most interesting effects.
If we analyse timbre, or more general the tone quality, we can say that it is composed of the following things:
- harmonic content, inharmonic, different amount of partials
- the partials amplitudes (Lesson 1-3)
- the attack and decay transient and their inharmonicities (Lesson 3)
- the resonant curves (see the resonant curves of a violin or clarinet for example)
Since all these elements appear and change over time, that’s how our ears perceive them, we can say the quality of a sound is thus composite and time developing. To act on sound over time, we need to add to our Max skills few more: creating actions, events, and processes.
Melody
There are three elements overall that we would need to be able to control to create a melodic line in Max:
- the pitch of a note
- the duration
- the expression
Pitch
So far we have learned how to set an oscillator to produce a specific frequency, and also how to make it change, perhaps via kslider or via dedicated message. We could be satisfied with our sound making.
Yet, that is relying on our input via mouse, and could be quite limited in terms of performance. The new objects presented are adding instead:
- expansion of physical direct user control via listener objects (check out timer object for example)
- construction of automated systems such as sequencers to order a melodic sequence of pitches, and their potential application to other sonic parameters
- interaction with the melodic performance with the application of new sonic or algorithmic events and actions
- the creation of proper scores via stored list of data, to orderly program a melody, or as well to explore alea (random) musical performance
Duration
Duration for us is determined by the function object, by the shape we want to give to sound. We have learned from additive synthesis that duration can also be different for each of the harmonic content of a sound. That creates interesting and richer effects. Take for example a sound with three components at 300, 500, and 700 Hz. If each of them has a different duration and also a different shape (e.g. a shorter decay, a faster attack transient etc), that would sound more articulate than just playing them at same duration and with the same shape.
It is by looking into these differences that makes the depth of a sound design work. In your synth try to make space for creating more variation and differences in sound as possible.
Expression
To define the term ‘expression’ one can say it refers to the evolution in time of the melody. Some composers refer to it as to the arch (Delli Pizzi, F. 2001).
Looking at the work of some of the greatest artists, creators of the most beautiful melodies of all times, we could see what is meant by ‘arch’.
Check out in this new Spotify playlist the sacred music for voice by Palestrina, and the madrigals by Gesualdo Da Venosa. Look at the arch of the melodies, the sense of perfection that comes from them, of elegance, balance, and also variety in the invention.
Closer to our days, A journey to Reedham by Squarepusher is quite an interesting example of obsessive melodic power and drive.
Not so obsessive, if you compare that then to Steve Reich’s Electric Counterpoint, or Morton Feldman’s Coptic Light. Coptic Light is a perpetual melodic pattern, repeated over and over in thousands of slight variations and orchestration. Feldman compared the sounds you will hear with the minimal differences in the identical patterns that can be spotted in coptic carpets, minimal differences due to the fact they are compeltely hand made.
A coptic carpet
A page from Coptic Light score
Or what about the Anchor Song in Bjork’s first album? That song consists of lots of melodies, blocked into prefix harmonic schemes, but with a very attractive rhythm.
Feldman piano music uses instead alea or aleatory processes rather than repetition. Notes, dynamics, durations are chosen at random or by guidance, but always with indeterminacy. This logic runs through those compositions, with interesting results. The piano sounds like suspended in time.
how about a score where everything is left to the interpretation of the performer, except for the sequence of events?
Expression might mean that, once we have put together the content, the pitch and the duration, we should look into making those evolve over time. Our attention can be placed on the overall arch and journey of the melody, on the rhythmical patterns it might create, on the internal dynamics of each session, and how the harmonic content varies in its journey from birth to fade.
Chords
If we look at chords, the first point is that we want synchronicity of pitch. Yet the components of the chord can each have their own independence. In general, we could think of a chord as a crossing of two or more melodies at one point in time. A vertical view as opposed to the horizontal of melody.
In Max, we have seen how to route data to each of our sound engines to be able to build chords. We have also seen how to prioritize commands (as with trigger) to also launch actions or other events that will go to modify the triggered sounds of a chord.
A chord, if seen as a sound event, can also happen not totally in sync, but having some rhythmical personality. With delays, we know now how to create chains of events following a main trigger, which could then launch several processes for generating more sounds at the same time, giving birth to harmony and chords.
Going through all these pages of Lesson 4, just explore them one at a time. This time , you should not be in a hurry to progress from one Max thing to the other, but try instead expanding and giving depth to your research work.