Week 11 - CC1

This week’s exercise was to continue working with the software Metasynth.

Apparently the algorithm by which the software works is sort-of CPU-consuming. The reason for that is the numerous times that the computer crashed. Apple computers have a good reputation of NOT crashing so I can’t blame the computer; it’s the software’s fault.
I don’t really know if the following exercise is the fifth or sixth time I actually did the job (refer to the issue of crashing)

1^st step of mine was to take a sound sample and derive it into Metasynth. I used a vocal sample of the recording of Audio Arts’ week 11. I normalised and got rid of the empty spaces (rests) using the software Audacity.Having put the result in the room “Spectrum Synth” of Metasynth, I rendered the result and saved it as an AIFF file to use it in the sequencer section of the software.
For sequencing, I needed few sound files so I chopped the result of the 2^nd step into 5 different files and used the “Sampler” of the “Sequencer” room of Metasynth.
This is how the sampler looks like. As apparent in the picture, I have 5 different files which are automatically recognised by the software. I just needed to address the folder in which the files were saved.
The last part of my job was to use the applications available in the “Montage” room of Metasynth. The entire idea looked like “Music Concrete” to me. I don’t really know how relevant that concept is to this exercise but I had an extremely hard time with Metasynth and I don’t really want to think about the relation of my ideas and the software.
You can hear the final result HERE.

I strongly advice everyone to avoid using this software, unless its bugs are fixed.

References:
- "Metasynth" software official website (Accessed [31.05.2007]), (www.metasynth.com)
- Christian Haines 'Creative Computing I' Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 24/05/2007.
- "Audacity" the software's official website (Accessed [31.05.2007]), (http://audacity.sourceforge.net)