Week 10 - CC1

This week’s exercise was to work with the software Metasynth and experiment the different effects it applies to the sound.
For the initial sound, I used the quote from last week, the “We become what we…” and inserted it in Metasynth.
As apparent in the picture below, the software has six different “rooms” and each of them works with different effects and changes the sound in a different way.I used the “effects room” and I applied effects “Pitch and time”, “Echo”, “Stereo Echo”, “Reverb”, “Resonator”, “Harmonics”, Stretch”, Harmonise”, “Phaser” and “Flanger”. Some of these effects’ functions are obvious like “Pitch and Time” which changes the pitch and (as a result of the change in the frequency) the time duration of the sample. “Stretch” changes the time duration of the sample according to the settings by the user. (I could not observe its function properly because I had affected the initial sample of mine using other effects prior to Stretch and it was a bit hard to precisely realise this particular effect’s effects.)
“Harmonics” adds harmonics (with regards to the key indicated and controlled-by-the-user in the software) to the basic pitchers (or rather frequencies)
One of the specialities of this software is the use of curves and manually-set diagrams to indicate the way the effect manipulates the sound.
I randomly drew curves and checked the results out.
After finishing my work in the “effects room”, I recorded the result using pro-tools. (Later I found out that I could have saved the file in AIFF format using Metasynth itself.)
“Image Synth” is another room in Metasynth where the information of generating sound is taken from an image. Again I came up with a random image and checked the result. I figured out that the vertical axis is used for the frequency; ie. The higher in the axis you go, the higher frequency you will get. The horizontal axis is for time. Because I applied a filter (which is another pre-set picture used as a filter) to my image, the beginning of the sample contains fewer frequencies and therefore it sounds like a fade-in. (which is well logical!)
I think because I almost used all the possible frequency range, my final waveform was like a rectangle, again pretty logical!I recorded this sample using pro-tools as well as shown in the picture below.

References:
- "Metasynth" software official website (Accessed [23.05.2007]), (www.metasynth.com)
- Christian Haines 'Creative Computing I' Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 17/05/2007.
- Krabye, Helge : ‘A short presentation of Metasynth 4’, Krabye.com (Accessed [23.05.2007]), (http://helge.krabye.com/metasynth.php)