AA wk6

This week proved much smoother as I feel I'm getting the hang of the program now. Although I had a bit of messing around getting my files in order, as the program doesn't seem to have a way of re-linking files when you move them around like Pro-Tools and Cubase do which is REALLY F***ing annoying to say the least. If I'm wrong and someone knows about how to do it in FMod I would be extremely great full to be shown/told how.

Having done the Engine part during class really helped me move through this part of the exercise quite quickly. Although as stated there was file location issues.

Engine Event



The Cycle part of the exercise was quite strait forward but I used some footstep sounds to create a sound event which might be able to be used in the game. Again the file location thing became an issue when I wanted to re-organise my folders.

Footstep Cycle Event



Reference:

Haines, Christian. “Audio Arts - Week 6 - Sound Asset Design.” Lecture presented at Tutorial Room 408, Level 4, Schultz building, University of Adelaide, 28th of August 2007.

Forum wk5

The hard wiring exercise this week was quite strait foward. Although I struggled with the concept of scratching away parts of the circuit board and hard wiring things to the exposed metal underneath. I wasn't sure what parts I should try scratching away or not.

It was fun however, soldering the pot to either side of the transistor so we could modulate the pitch/play back speed. In fact I think thats one of my favourite parts of circuit bending. :)

We also hard wired the pot to control the volume.

Hardwired Volume





Hardwired Pitch





Reference:

Haines, Christian. “Forum – Week 5 – Circuit Bending II.” Workshop presented at the Department of Engineering, Intermediate Practical Laboratory, University of Adelaide, 23rd of August 2007.

Tomczak, Sebastian. “Forum – Week 5 – Circuit Bending II.” Workshop presented at the Department of Engineering, Intermediate Practical Laboratory, University of Adelaide, 23rd of August 2007.

AA wk5

It took a bit of playing around with my computer once the power went back on but I got it all running smoothly again and so here is my AA Stuff.

Heres a Zip of the folder with the session file and samples used.
AAwk5




I think it was a pretty steep learning curve with this weeks exercise as being a brand new program there was this automatic need to figure everything out. Although we weren't expected to do that much, I think it kind of comes with the nature of learning a new program to get absorbed in it and thus spend more time than you should be on it.

I'm happy with the water sounds, which move between having crickets or no crickets. I can see how that would work with just a continuous loop until it is told to slowly move to the next sample which has an even fade between the two.

Water fading between with/without crickets



The footstep sounds are quite simple, as they are just single triggers with a slight pitch variation on each. Although I was annoyed at the fact that the pitch variation changes the playback speed and thus a sample that is meant to sound slower becomes to fast.

Footsteps



The Birds sounds is where I had problems. I wanted to layer the bird sounds so that they are played randomly with ocassions of overlapping sounds etc. I wasn't sure whether I was supposed to be able to do that in FMod or whether that is something that is programed into the game?

Birds tweeting



Least we forget, the humble Potato



Reference:

Haines, Christian. “Audio Arts – Week 5 - Audio Engines Analysis.” Lecture presented at Tutorial Room 408, Level 4, Schultz building, University of Adelaide, 21st of August 2007.

CC wk5

I was slightly rushed trying to get this weeks exercise completed. So I did quite a rushed job and thus created something much the same as last week, but using FM synthesis instead of Additive Synthesis. I hope to make time to do something much more creative with these concepts so that I can learn more, but alas time is always an issue. Sometimes I wish I was doing a course specifically on Max so I could completely dedicate my time to it. (yes I am a nerd)



The Sound of FM Sythesis

Project folder

Reference:

Haines, Christian. “Creative Computing – Week 5 – “Synthesis (2) - Vibrato, FM and Waveshaping.” Lecture presented at Tutorial Room 408, Level 4, Schultz building, University of Adelaide, 23rd of August 2007.

Forum wk4

I was slightly disappointed with the results of this week, as not matter how much I searched I could not find an area of any of the circuts which would change the playback speed/pitch of the samples. I was only able to experiment with creating loops. In this way I found the simpler 'light force' toy we 'hacked' in class much more rewarding. I would have like to experiment more, but ran out of time (considering all the other work I have to do.)


Sorry about the delay, but bloggers server was down yesterday. here are the you tube videos!

An Explanation of the Toy before being 'hacked.'



Circuit bending with cool results but sucky sound.



Cicuit bending with better visuals and sound, but not as good as the first (in my opinion).



Reference:

Haines, Christian. “Forum – Week 4 – Circuit Bending.” Workshop presented at the Department of Engineering, Intermediate Practical Laboratory, University of Adelaide, 16th of August 2007.

Tomczak, Sebastian. “Forum – Week 4 – Circuit Bending.” Workshop presented at the Department of Engineering, Intermediate Practical Laboratory, University of Adelaide, 16th of August 2007.

CC wk4

This week added the same issue as last week. POLY! After much messing around I did to get it to work in the end. I have come to the realisation that you can't feed any signal into the poly object, and thus need to have all cycle etc objects inside it. It seems rather silly as there are specific in~ objects so you would assume you could use these?

I do feel I have made project though. I hope that we get a chance to expand our patches to include the 2 other things covered in the readings (AM and FM). Because I always understand things better when getting to do something practical with them.

CCwk4 folder


Audio Example

Reference:

Haines, Christian. “Creative Computing – Week 4 – “Synthesis (1) - Additive, Tremolo, RM and AM.” Lecture presented at Tutorial Room 408, Level 4, Schultz building, University of Adelaide, 16th of August 2007.

AA wk4

When I went to find information on Fable I discoveredthat Lionhead studios are very secretive and found it virtually impossible to get information on their Audio/Development Engines. These are links to the little information I did find.

http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Games_that_use_Vorbis

http://wiki.xiph.org/index.php/Vorbis

http://www.vorbis.com/

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/f/fable/behindthegame3.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fel64/Fable_2#Technology

So instead I've done my Audio/Development Engine research on the game Shadowrun. I choose this game as it was quite simple to find information on the Audio and Development Engine, and as I spent 3 hours or so looking for information on Fable, I felt this was justifiable.





http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadowrun_%282007_video_game%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wwise

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audiokinetic

Shadowrun uses the Sound Engine Wwise, which was developed by the Company Audiokinetic. It is a middleware product designed to interface with any game engine. From the information I sorted through, Wwise comes accross as a Audio made easy for games.



http://www.audiokinetic.com/4105/wwise-introduction.asp

The basic selling point of the product is that it is designed as with an intuitive interface so that Sound Designers and programmers can readily test and implement sounds. It also claims to leave itself open to programmers creating custom plugins to extend the functionality of the engine.

From looking through the website information, it reminds me greatly of 'ProTools' or 'Cubase.' These are both great programs, but are obviously constantly being upgraded as technology and features improve. I can't help but wonder whether Wwise will become similar. Obviously any Sound Engine will dictate the way in which creative ideas are realised and implemented, but would game developers prefer to maintain a higher level of control and avoid a program which seems to make features generic by packaging them?

http://www.audiokinetic.com/4105/wwise-introduction.asp

http://www.audiokinetic.com/4105/file.asp?file_id=400.


There is very little information on the Development engine that was used, but I did discover that the engine was modeled closely after the "source" engine used in Halo2.

http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/2006/11/02/Multi_core_in_the_Source_Engin/1

I also discovered that they had to build the game engine from scrap to interface Xbox and Windows Vista

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/tech/shadowrun.html

http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/2006/11/02/Multi_core_in_the_Source_Engin/1

Reference:

Haines, Christian. “Audio Arts – Week 4 – Game Engine Overview.” Lecture presented at Tutorial Room 408, Level 4, Schultz building, University of Adelaide, 14th of August 2007.

Forum wk3

Tyrell and I worked through all of the bread board tasks this week, but when it came to recreating the piezzo driver that we did at the start of the forum class his laptop (which we were using to record with) ran out of battery and we concluded that as we did it in class, and that task c of the bread board exercises was similar, it wasn't of great importance.

Task A we improvised with a bit and used our fingers to complete the circut and thus were able to use our bodies like a pot and alter the ristance via the pressure of our hands on the resistor in the bread board.



Exercise A

Task B we also improvised with as we found we got more significant timbral results when we connected the Light Sensitive Resistor in series with the pot rather than how the sheet specified.



Exercise B

Task C we did how was described. it was quite interesting modulating the source sound with a square wave and was by far the highlight of the tasks this week.



Exercise C

Reference:

Haines, Christian. “Forum - Week 3 – Bread boarding.” Workshop presented at the Department of Engineering, Intermediate Practical Laboratory, University of Adelaide, 9th August 2007.

Tomczak, Sebastian. “Forum - Week 3 – Bread boarding.” Workshop presented at the Department of Engineering, Intermediate Practical Laboratory, University of Adelaide, 9th August 2007.

CC wk3

This week proved to be quite a challenge for me. I had to completely restructure my patch for it to work properly with the poly object, moving a lot of features inside the poly object and adding extra inputs so it would work. That stated, it still won't agree with the ramped mute bpatcher. I decided that I allready was starting to spend too much time on it and so have left that feature un-connected.





Patch Zip

Reference:

Haines, Christian. “Creative Computing – Week 3 – Polyphony and Instancing.” Lecture presented at Tutorial Room 408, Level 4, Schultz Building, Thursday the 9th of August, 2007.

AA - wk3 - Fable Sounds Assets list

I chose Fable to do a sounds assets list for as I heard it had a good variety of sounds. I was amazed at the amount of detail put into sounds. There are multiple versions of each sound, a vast variety of ambient sounds and a huge amount of character and creature sounds. I played the game for about 5 minute and found I had an abundance of sounds listed and so left it at that.

I'm kind of glad I didn't have to play it for that long as I probably would of gotten sucked in and forgotten all about uni work.

Here is my assets list plus a link to a You Tube Video of Fable. I couldn't find a video which included that first part of the game, except for one where the sound quality was very average. I didn't think it worth posting a link. But I'm sure you can gather an idea for this video.

Assets List
Fable You Tube Video



Reference:

Haines, Christian. “Audio Arts – Week 3 – Process and Planning.” Lecture presented at Tutorial room 408, Level 4, Schultz Building, University of Adelaide, 7th of August 2007.

Creative Computing Wk2

I found this week that I needed to break down the task into little 45min - hour blocks rather than doing it in one sitting. This helped me approach it fresh each time and move forward and not get to bogged down by little things which usually hold me up.

I'm not totally sure if what I have been doing is what it required of us but I like the way that I turned the into patch into a help file so it is easy to understand and you can just copy and paste a bpatcher of each segment as required in future use.

Thanks to Ben Probert for showing me how to have mute disabled when the sound is turned off.




Creative Computing Zip Folder

Reference:

Haines, Christian. ‘Creative Computing – Week 2 - Signal Switching and Routing:’ Lecture presented in Tutorial Room 408, Level 4 Schultz building, University of Adelaide. 2nd July, 2007.

Forum wk 2

I think I mastered my soldiering abilities this week. I had some fairly average soldiering attempts when making my necklace, but by the time it came to creating the piezo mic's I was a pro.

When it came to actually experimenting with the piezo mic's I teamed up with Tyrell. I was really keen to try getting the sounds of underwater, so we put a condom around the piezo to make it water proof, plugged it into a mini amp and put in a bucket of water. This didn't create any sound whatsoever.Moving the water around didn't do much either.

Then I remembered that my next door neighbors had a water feature which used a pump to blow bubbles up in a pot of water and shells. So we tried that.

Originally we tried simply submersing the mic once more, but the movement of the water seemed to minimal to have any audio results. Then I moved the mic next to the actual point where the water was bubbling and bingo, an interesting sound came through. Tyrell suggested putting a shell between the mic and the water bubbles (resting the mic on the back of the shell.) This added an interesting texture to the sound. To finish up with the water feature I also placed the mic on the water pump which sounded similar to some sort of an engine to me.







Other sounds recorded was Tyrell typing on his keyboard and my friend Faolan plucking a tennis racket. I would like to use some of the tennis racket samples in a composition.

Water Bubbles

Water with Shell

Bubble Generator

Typing

Playing the Tennis Racket

Reference:


Collins, Nicolas. “Handmade Electronic Music: The Art of Hardware Hacking.” TF-ROUTL, 2006.

Haines, Christian. “Forum - Week 2 – Input and output.” Workshop presented at the Department of Engineering, Intermediate Practical Laboratory, University of Adelaide, 2nd August 2007.