Creating explosion sounds for ibb & obb

Here I talk about an approach to creating explosion sounds, in Ableton Live, that I've been using for ibb & obb.

ibb & obb: sonic decoration for assisted jumps

A couple more half-formed ibb & obb sound thoughts.

ibb & obb progress through the levels by finding ways to get past physical obstacles. Often, it's important to propel your character high into the air as part of the puzzle-solving process.

It wasn't immediately obvious to me when I first played, but with the help of your partner it's possible to do an 'assisted jump': You stand on your partners head, they jump, you are propelled upwards as if stuck to their head, and at the apex of their jump*, you jump. The result is that you achieve double the height you would otherwise have reached.

This came as a surprise to me since much of the ibb & obb world behaves in close accordance with real-world physics. Since this technique is important to the game, and since it feels a little weird, at least to me, I'd like to use sound to 'address' this weirdness--I want to draw attention to the assisted jump maneuver, to help underscore that this is not an accident--but there by design, and to reinforce the impression _that_ this is a departure from real world physics, to help the game 'own' this deviation.

An assisted jump, when performed optimally (or close to optimally) would be accompanied by a sonic 'reward'. Not necessarily a special sound, but certainly audio feedback that would distinguish it from lesser jumps. After a while the rhythm of the sonic events that surround assisted jumps would become engrained in players' subconscious, there'd be a kind of sensory redundancy going on: advanced players may even be able to perform perfect assisted jumps with their eyes closed!

* It turns out that the apex isn't the best moment after all. The vertical velocity of the bottom player is added to that of the top player as it starts its jump. There is an optimum moment for gaining maximum height, but it's not at the apex, which makes things more interesting.

First thoughts on ibb & obb sound

I'm excited to be creating the sound effects for the ibb & obb game in 2012!



I'll start with a disclaimer: I haven't been a gamer since the Amiga roamed the earth, and this is my first game sound assignment. So although I like to believe I have relevant skills all the same, I'm a complete novice when it comes to these specific fields. Richard, the game's designer, mentioned that he didn't want ibb & obb's sound to have a strong 'game sound' character, so I'm hoping it makes sense to frame my lack of experience as a different angle of entry.

Emotion schmemotion!

I hesitate to call what I'll be doing 'sound design' because of a couple of behind the scenes videos I watched lately. They dealt with first person shooter games primarily, so there's a question about how much of what they say is applicable to ibb & obb in the first place. But they did make some generalizations that I had some trouble with. The sound guys were describing how it's the job of a sound designer to add emotion to a sound, to help carry the story.

What does it mean to 'add emotion to a sound'? The example given was how to deal with a pistol shot. What's the emotion that's appropriate to pair with a pistol shot?, the designers tell us it's fear, so their approach in this case may be to find another sound that evokes a primal fear response, the roar of a lion, and layer that with the pistol shot.

I don't doubt that the result might sound great. But the rationale is very dubious in my opinion. In my view the job of this sound designer, if I'm going to refer to myself that way, will be to make sounds that work well in the game. That's an appropriately vague mission statement. 'Working well' might not have much to do with the initial thoughts I have about how to approach the project. Or my initial idea of what ibb & obb's 'story' is. I'm expecting an iterative approach: recording, processing, play-testing, and repeating that process as often as necessary. This leaves plenty of room for surprises, happy accidents, and it's through this process that I expect to learn exactly what constitutes the sound 'working well', as far as Richard and I are concerned.

Melon smashing

The sound design videos that I've seen also have in common the perpetuation of the idea that game sound should be 'larger than life'--for instance an in-game kill is accompanied by a melon-smash layered with several leak crunches and an oozing grapefruit squeeze for good measure. It's a bit like the game-sound analogue to the loudness war. I don't think this received wisdom--roughly: 'make everything POP!', is necessarily true. When we take this approach, I think the result is a kind of sound pantomime, crass. I think our ability to suspend disbelief, as well as our ability to 'live with' game sound, is harmed when every sound in the game is inflated like a steroid-popping bodybuilder, when all sounds are yelling 'Listen to me!'. I'm not talking about the level of the sound effects, but about their sonic character--the part that doesn't change as you turn the level up or down.

Sound goggles

I'm noticing that this assignment has already made quite a difference to how I'm looking at the world. I find it interesting to notice that the outward appearance of an object is a very unreliable indicator of the kinds of sounds that can be coaxed from it. I noticed, and grabbed a filthy bike chain off the road today. A mental air-punch / success kid moment.

When my upstairs neighbors dropped something heavy on the the floor above my bathroom, and my glass bowl light fitting dislodged and smashed on floor, my first thought--or maybe the second one--was 'if only the recorder was running'. The thin glass ricocheting against the hard tiles gave a terrifically long and detailed tail to the smash.

Vocalisations

I was happy hear that Richard sees ibb & obb, the protagonists, as mute. They won't have vocalisations in the game. I think this is pretty important. Many years ago I played worms with my brother. Somehow, the version we played included no vocalisations (squeaky worm voices) perhaps it was a demo version without the final audio, I"m not sure. Later we played a version with vocalisations, I really dislike the change. Previously we'd been supplying our own exclamations! Delivering a well-crafted burn, or repeating an evolving in-joke was part of the fun of playing. Having the worms speak felt as though the legitimacy of doing that ourselves was being denied or diminished. The effect was a degree of alienation from the characters who represented us on screen.

I appreciate that the social aspect of ibb & obb's cooperative gameplay is an important aspect of the game's design. The fact that two people are sitting in close proximity while playing isn't just an accidental side-effect. During a play-test Richard jokingly complained that my co-gamer and I weren't talking to each other enough while we played (in our defense my comrade was engaged in another conversation while he played). By 'stepping back', by getting out of the way of the process of players identifying with the green and red sprites, I think responsible sound design can--in a round-about way--help strengthen the real life interaction that the on-screen puzzle solving triggers.

Professor Ojo Interview

Professor Ojo - Schemes and Plans (BR026) - snippets by Bedroom Research

BH. Hi Ben. You've just released the excellent Professor Ojo album 'Plans and Schemes' on the Bedroom Research label. At the moment you're a bit of a mysterious figure at least in the sense of the information about you online. If you're comfortable with shedding that anonymity, can you tell us a bit about yourself?

Ben Yeah it's not really a conscious effort to be anonymous, probably more that I'm terrible at writing biogs!

Although I do like the idea of the music coming first you know?

Based in Newcastle, been making music on and off for maybe 8 or 9 years now, it keeps me occupied. I live with my lovely girlfriend and a cat who's not so lovely.

BH That's Newcastle in the UK right? Bio writing is pretty horrible, I can relate to that--the idea is to present the music, not necessarily the person who made it. I'm curious about the names, 'Professor Ojo' and 'Schemes and Plans', what do these mean to you, do these labels have (or have they come to have) special significance for your project and album respectively?

Ben Yeah Newcastle in the tropical North East of England! Well the music came long before the name, basically I felt that I had some stuff to show people so I 'borrowed' the name from DC comics. Just seemed to fit really, plus the DC Ojo stole an atomic submarine which is something I'd like to do one day.

Again the album title came after the tracks were finished. I guess it means a couple of things, the tracks on the album vary between 2 or 3 years old and brand new so for that period of time (and before) there's always loads of scheming and planning going on i.e trying to get somewhere with the music or whatever and just in general life. Someone's always got some kind of big idea: sometimes they go somewhere, sometimes they don't. I quite like the idea of all these half-formed plans and ideas bubbling around everywhere, gathering momentum.

BH The album sounds very coherent both stylistically and sonically so it's perhaps surprising to hear that they were produced over a few years. Was it challenging at all to make a selection and 'pull them together' for the release?

Ben That's good to hear. I think when I'm producing I've got a certain vibe in mind and it's quite specific, so even though they weren't necessarily made in the same time period I probably approached them with the same mindset if that makes sense? I do tend to work on a few beats at a time so they may end up sharing certain qualities, depending on my mood etc.

I'd been sending Matt quite a few tracks so he was the one who eventually made the selection. The tracklist has changed a few times, I lost a 500gb drive with a tonne of beats on it so some of the original selections are gone. Which reminds me I really really need to back everything up!

BH Ouch about the HD loss! I've been using Mozy home over the last couple of years. It's an online backup thing--I know that if its not automatic, I'll end up not doing it.

Schemes and Plans has a strong organic feel that comes, I think, primarily from having overtly digital sounds placed off the DAW's grid, way further than traditional ideas of groove would have pushed them. Can you say something about your approach to sequencing with this extremely loose feel?

Ben Ah nice I'll check that out.

Yeah that's it exactly I just like the idea of quite unnatural sounds put together in a bit of an organic way.

I probably sequence in the simplest way possible- everything's just played in live from either the MPD pads or my keyboard. I never quantize anything. I think a lot of the looseness is a result of trying to get shit done as quickly as possible. I try to get a track pretty much done in about an hour so a lot of the time all the parts I use will be the first thing I bash into Logic. I tend to work best when ideas are fresh, even if i'm not sure where it's going to go , I'm not one for sitting about tweaking a riff for ages, it's more about grabbing the idea at that particular moment in time. I try to keep things on the right side of wrong but it probably doesn't always work. That's it in a nutshell: just switch off quantize and bash pads!

BH It sounds appealing! You mentioned you use logic, is that your primary sequencing/arranging environment? Are there other applications/instruments/synths/plugins that you use particularly heavily on this album?

Ben It is. Pretty much everything's done in Logic with a bunch of plugins. There's a few plugins that always seem to go for, vintage warmer, I've recently discovered the camelphat which is fun. The synths are all soft-synths, I think I used a mini-moog quite a lot. I'd love some more hardware really though, stuff like a space echo and some analogue goodness but the prices are just way too much.

BH Do you play your material in a live setting? How do you approach that, and what's it like playing in Newcastle venues?

Ben I do play live, although I've only played a very few times. Normally just with laptop and the MPD24. I just render my tracks into 2 or 4 or 8 bar loops and try to build a set out of them. really it's been the same kind of thing right through, I started with Ableton live 3, but i recently got 6 ( I think) which does a lot more!

I think Newcastle's definitely got a lot better for this kind of music recently, no one's thrown anything at me yet.

BH What's your favourite track from the album at the moment?

Ben Probably Zebras, maybe My Island. It's weird I don't really "like" or "not like" my stuff.

BH Do you currently have any music related plans/schemes/directions/experiments/plans you're excited about developing/working on?

Ben Welllll, I've got a load of stuff to release, probably 2 more albums are ready about now so just final touches then maybe try to find them a home or put them out through bandcamp or similar. Also i've got a load of 130-140 bpm stuff that no one's heard so might do something with those.

BH Is there anything related to music making that you wish you'd known a few years ago?

Ben Yeah, that it would kill my bank balance!!

BH Anything else you'd like to add/mention/promote/announce?

Ben Don't quite want to jinx things just yet but there should be some vinyl soonish. Also as I mentioned some bandcamp action soonish aswell.

Also anyone in Newcastle should check this: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=153740574659359

and this

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=156655187702148

BH Thanks very much, and more power to your beat making elbow!

Ben haha thanks lot man, really appreciate you doing this :)

Momentary footswitches as controllers for music performances

In recent times, when I dedicate any thinking to the problem of how to arrange controls for live performances, one of the things that my brain tells me is 'footswitch'.

Because I'm generally using Max/MSP or Ableton Live, or ChucK, I can use a variety of on/off signals and get them to do useful things; MIDI notes, keystrokes, mouse-clicks are all fine.

I thought it wouldn't be that difficult to find a cheap but durable momentary footswitch that 'spoke' one of these signals. Unfortunately it not as easy as I thought.

The money-cheapest solution I came across was Matt Meshulam's passive footswitch hack, inspired by MOTU's Volta system. A battery is soldered into a standard passive analogue footswitch. The switch is then plugged into one of your soundcard inputs, and a max patch (or similar) repeatedly checks the DC input signal. When it detects a change, a MIDI event or keystroke is generated, which can finally be used to manipulate the parameter you want to be controlling. I think this is ingenious but, for my intuition at least, the audio polling involved seems like a waste of processing power.

Searches for MIDI footswitches turned up products that do too much compared to what I need.

Searching instead for keyboard and mouse replacements in stores specialising in accessibility brought up some interesting devices that I hadn't seen before (see the 'puff', and 'sip' breath switch), but tended to be more expensive than I thought was necessary too.

Searching from a more gaming-related angle I found the Stealthswitch II. Among other things it's a keystroke emulating USB footswitch. Conveniently, extra passive footswitches can be plugged into it, and addressed by its software. I ordered this one, and will post back once I've had a change to test it a bit. (NB. don't confuse the Stealthswitch II with the identical looking original Stealthswitch, a secretly-play-games-at-work aid which doesn't have keystroke emulation).

Please post in the comments if you have any thoughts on footswitches for musical control purposes.

Also, because of a domain name expiry blunder the new Basement Hum url is http://basementhum.blogspot.com/

Mormo - Epicurean Swerve. (BR025) for streaming and download

From today the second Mormo album, Epicurean Swerve, is available for streaming and (high quality mp3) download at Bedroom Research.

Mastering: Melograf
Artwork: Amose

Two tracks taken from Epicurean Swerve:
Winsmithfield by mormo

Fonich by mormo

Hope you enjoy it!

Pitch Drop - A Max for Live device.

The fruit of my first max for live dabblings is a recreation of the pitch drop (record stop) effect. Pitch Drop emulates the effect of a turntable platter winding down. Incoming audio slows down to a stop at an adjustable rate.
Download it here.

Update: there's also TapeStop, which I overlooked. Though at the moment it has an issue with a click at the end of a complete drop.

WORM CEM Studio

This week Thomas Margolf and I spent a few days noodling on the synths at WORM's CEM studio at their building in Delfshaven.

The ARPs
In my view, the stars of our visit were the two ARPs. The ARP 2600, famous for hand-played synth-jazz stuff (Herby Hancock) was capable of dark, rich rubbery/metallic electronic bass in a sequenced context too. It's predecessor, the ARP 2500, is an modular giant. Thomas got it speaking a language of zaps and squiggles by having its sequencers modulate an overdriven filter. I think that the crosstalk inherent in the slider-based patching system was adding to the sense that that particular patch had a life of its own.

Arp excerpt by basementhum

Grit
The pots and faders of the synths often felt gritty, and some were outright broken. In particular the poor Putney VCS3, the Doctor Who synth, was in bad shape. Despite its damage (or perhaps partly because of it) it provided a spooky batch of squeals, gargles and farts. Among the remaining instruments we used, the odd modules that were either broken, or that we just couldn't figure out, didn't stand in the way of making great noises. The fact that we hadn't set out with a clear goal beyond experimentation and sample collecting also helped avoid frustration. For next time, a multimeter or an oscilloscope would have been a useful debugging aid.

Connections
Sequencing the old synths from Ableton Live was done with the help of two Kenton MIDI to CV boxes. Generally, the pitch CV cable needed be wired to a synth input called something like 'Keyboard CV', while the gate CV cable was wired to a correspondingly named input (and sometimes, needed to be fed to a 'trigger' input too). The synth audio gets routed to a big mixing desk, which in turn feeds the main speakers and is linked to the computer for multitrack recording. We left on friday with the huge Ableton Live session copied to our memory sticks.

If you're a musician living anywhere in the neighbourhood of Rotterdam, and would like a chance to use these amazing machines before they become even more rare (there were only around 100 ARP 2500's ever made), get in contact with Henk from WORM. To get the most of your visit it'd be good if you had at least some knowledge of subtractive synthesis. I think WORM organises workshops too, which could give you a leg up in this area if you're new to it all.

Piezo mics sucking up hidden vibrations

Using piezo contact mics is a fast and cheap way to capture otherworldly noises. Because you're recording vibrations through solid objects rather than through the air, atmospheric background noise tends to me much lower than what you'd pick up with a regular mic. This means it's not too difficult to get a usable signal/noise ratio from recordings made in everyday situations, you don't need to resort to using a acoustically isolated studio.

I connected a piezo to a battery-powered FET High Impedance Buffer and then into the line input of a Tascam DR-100. The piezo was mounted onto surfaces with some electrical tape, or with a clothes peg. Here's a montage of bits recorded in a nearby workshop.

Contact mic by basementhum

ChucK: Danger to your ears when working with filters

Currently ChucK seems to have a filter instability problem in certain situations. This post is a duplicate of the warning I posted to the ChucK list (I'll update it once the problem is fixed).

Here's some code from ChucK user Kijjaz that demonstrates the problem:

PulseOsc osc => BPF filter => blackhole;
20000 => filter.freq;
0.5 => filter.Q;
for(int i; i < 100; i++)
{
   <<< "osc: ", osc.last(), " filter: ", filter.last() >>>;
   samp => now;
}

The value output by the filter keeps rising.

I ran into this problem while I had a similar patch connected to dac (digital analogue converter, the ChucK element that translates things into sound, that gets sent to the speakers) instead of to a blackhole (another ChucK element, that doesn't result in sound over the speakers).

Don't run the following code!

// CAUTION! causes filter blow-up on macbook!

PulseOsc osc => ADSR env => BPF filter => dac;
20000=>filter.freq;
0.5=>filter.Q;
while(true){
 1::second=>now;
 env.keyOn();
 20::ms=>now;
 env.keyOff();
}

I was wearing headphones, but I took the usual precaution of turning my macbook volume to the lowest level above 0 before running the patch. To my alarm, the resulting screaming sound came through my headphones at top volume anyway. It turns out that when set to any of the volume gradations above 0, the screaming happens at effectively full volume on my macbook.

So the point of this post is to emphasise that (at least for mac users) there's a 'screaming filter' issue with ChucK that's currently quite dangerous for hearing/speakers, even if you take (imo) normal sensible precautions before running a patch.

This is a bit of a blocker for the joystick sequencer I'm working on at the moment, but apart from this I've been enjoying working with ChucK. Partly inspired by the Ardour book sprint, there's a ChucK documentation sprint planned for later this month, which should mean that it'll be (even) easier for new users to gets started soon.

Ardour Book Sprint

Yesterday I joined in with the Ardour book sprint hosted at moddr in Rotterdam.

The idea is to learn about the Ardour DAW through the process of contributing to a manual that explains how to carry out common tasks.

The manual is hosted on FLOSS Manuals, a site which is "a collection of manuals about free and open source software together with the tools used to create them and the community that uses those tools."

Participants loosely coordinate between themselves which chapters each person will be creating. Proofreading of new chapters was delegated in a similar way. Unlike a wiki, the organisation of work isn't entirely non-hierarchical. Each FLOSS manual has a maintainer with special permissions related to publishing completed chapters.

The clearly defined goal and deadline inherent in the book sprint format work very well as motivational factors, as does the sense of a 'team' that inevitably emerges through working in the same physical space as other participants.

The sprint goes on until friday, and is well worth a look if you're interested in learning about Ardour, powerful and free music software.

Ardour

Ardour seems like a very respectable DAW, particularly for people looking for software to function like a digital multitrack.

Inevitably, I'm comparing it with Ableton Live. There are irritations here. I was disappointed at the number of steps required to duplicate a phrase (made of multiple clips/regions, with space between those regions). In Live this is a two step process;

1. Drag select a box around the phrase you want to duplicate,
2. Press apple+D to duplicate the range on the timeline. The newly created range is selected so that subsequent apple+D presses create further copies.

This is how it looks:

At least according to the findings of our group, duplicating a phrase in an equivalent way in Ardour needs a good deal more explanation.

Ardour offers region duplication or range duplication. But neither seem to give the result I expected.

In case any Ardour users are reading, is there something I'm overlooking here?

Update: I spoke to an Ardour developer who confirmed that there was a bug in the way Duplicate Range currently works, so hopefully this will get better in the near future.

32nd notes with 16th swing

Deciding how to handle 32nd notes with 16th swing in the ChucK looper I'm building. I'll do it like the diagram shows. Not sure if this is normal or not, but it sounds musically sensible.

The swing is controllable from the joystick. At the moment only swing amount is variable, but swing resolution could be a candidate for live switching too. Changes to swing are 'queued' and affected only when the sequencer reaches the next 'unswung' step; so in case the looper is synchronised with an external source, that happy relationship won't be thrown out of whack.

Poke 20

A good while ago I contributed a remix of the Monty On The Run theme to a compilation called Poke 20. The collection was published the other day, you can find the player below.

21 renditions of the same song, back-to-back can be a bit tiring. But be sure to check the contributions from Transfolmer, Radion, Mormo ;) and huUtch.

ChucK

I've been using ChucK lately. The idea is to re-write the max joystick patch in a text-based language so it's more easily extendable.

The inevitable learning pains of getting started with a new environment have been very minor compared to what I'm used to. The ChucK manual is pretty good, and though the online community seems fairly small, it's populated by intelligent and helpful users. I've been using the n00b-friendly electro-music chuck forum so far. It's moderated by Kassen, who's a patient fountain of ChucK knowledge.

In just a few hours (including research time) I've gotten a simple recording step sequencer going, with a shuffle function, driving a monophonic drum synth object. I have enough encapsulation and transparency in the application to feel as though I'm 'doing it right' in broad lines, which is a rare thing for my first project in a new language.

Particularly refreshing is the way chuck deals with time. The ChucK authors refer to the chuck approach as 'strongly timed'. In chuck, you explicitly ask to 'advance time' by manipulating the 'now' object a thing called 'now'. While time is 'advancing' in the current shred (a shred is like a thread but different) the local unit generators do their thing and make sound. This scheme feels odd at first, but it quickly starts to make sense. One of the consequences of this way of working is that ChucK makes no distinction between control and audio rate data. You're free to set up loops that cycle at whatever rate you like (even sub sample rates are allowed).

If, like me you're daunted by Supercollider, but frustrated by graphic environments like Max/MSP, take a look at ChucK.

SUMMS : 16stages, Mormo, Unseenmachine

Here's a three-track release I worked on together with 16stages and Unseenmachine, for your enjoyment.