RLPF.ar

Thursday, first thing in the morning. That's when we go to Guangzhou. I'm eager to go, and tired of stagnating in Zhuhai -- true, I've been working away on music, but it's mostly self-directed activity, not much inspiration coming from people around me. But I'd be lying if I didn't admit the nerves are starting to come back. If we forget something while packing, isn't convenient to come back. Then there are all the official appointments -- residency registration and various attendant procedures, meetings and lunches or dinners with school officials, class planning, and probably some things I can't even imagine yet. Never mind getting work ready for a preview showing on August 31 for the Kennedy Center grant committee.

Just a little pressure.

The work, at least, is going well. Over the last couple of days, I stitched together a couple of clips I prepared over the summer and plugged the sounds into the spatial reverbs (also worked out before). It went from sounding pretty cool to sounding (if I may risk immodesty) crazy fantastic. This will be a nice bit of work to reassure the school that I know what I'm doing!

One of the elements was especially tricky to plug into the reverbs. It's made of individual harmonics at specific frequencies, and I wanted to move them around individually in the virtual space. That's easy. What's hard is applying a formant filter to get vocal-like sounds prior to passing the signals into the reverbs -- each partial goes directly into the reverbs, there was no way to insert other processing in the middle without duplicating the filters once for each partial -- CPU expensive! Instead, I adapted a formula online to calculate the amount that the filter would affect each frequency, and then scale the frequencies by those amounts. Since the frequencies are always the same, it's straightforward to precalculate, and simple multiplication on the audio side is a lot faster than a real filter. It works! The vocal qualities come through and moving the partials around adds another dimension to the overall sound that is better than expected.

I have my to-do list before the KC showing (thanks to org-mode in Emacs -- super-convenient since I write all my code in Emacs too!). Very nice today to tick off a lot of items, and not have to add a bunch of new ones for new problems.