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It's a rarified way of making music - the ultra-minimal monome grid and norns open music platform. But what is it really about? We turn to reviewer Andreas Roman to find out.

The post monome’s alternative musical world: a hands-on creative expedition with norns and grid appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

We have seen a fair share of unusual items being turned into musical instruments. Luckily, with a little bit of hacking it is possible to turn almost anything into a MIDI controller. [William Sun Petrus] just converted a 1920s typewriter into a drum machine and delivers a hell of a live performance on it.

The build is rather simple, all [William Sun Petrus] needed was an Arduino Mega and lots of wires to convert a hundred-year-old Remington typewriter into a MIDI controller. Whenever a key is pressed the hammer hits a metal plate at the center of the typewriter and closes the contact between one of the Arduino’s IO pins and the 5 V rail like a regular push button. The Arduino code is based on the MIDI library sending commands to a PC which is running Hairless MIDI and Ableton. As sort of a gimmick, [William Sun Petrus] included an LCD screen which shows a line from Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss every time a key is pressed.

Interestingly, the latency due to the hammer’s travel time does not disturb [William Sun Petrus’] live play. To calm the skeptics in the comments he also released an unedited version of the video to prove that the performance is real and an instructional video on how to play his beat note by note.

Other unusual MIDI controllers include a bandoneon accordion or this English concertina.

Video after the break.

[Thanks to Markus for the tip]

Algorave culture has been training years for this – it’s an audiovisual form that can make even a screen and streamed sound really come alive. Just watch – and actually, don’t just watch, here’s how to learn, too. Normally, algorave articles talk breathlessly about code, blah blah, people coding on screen, isn’t that nerdy, look […]

The post Get lost in stupidly ace sounds and imagery of the algorave, then get smarter and make your own appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

When listening to music you sometimes cannot avoid the situation where other people get annoyed because they feel it disrupts their important doings or they do not share your taste in avant-garde doom metal. Of course one could just use headphones. But a hackier way would be to build a parametric speaker that focuses soundwaves into a narrow beam like [Shane] did with this ultrasonic sound gun.

As the directivity of a soundwave depends on the size of the source and its frequency, a directed beam can practically only be achieved with ultrasound. Even though we are not able to perceive frequencies above ~20 kHz, the nonlinear properties of air make it possible to hear the audio modulated onto an ultrasonic carrier signal. For his sound gun [Shane] was inspired by another parametric speaker project. It took him some time to get the 555 timer circuit oscillating at the right frequency and he fried a cheap Bluetooth audio module while trying to increase the output volume but in the end, he managed to get everything working. As the project name suggests, he also 3D printed a gun-shaped enclosure. The video below shows that the sound from the gun behaves really similar to a beam of light and can, for example, be bounced off other objects.

If you are looking for other inspiration there is a whole list of cool ultrasonic projects from distance sensors to acoustic levitation.

Exactly one year after 2.0, Carla version 2.1 is here!

Carla is an audio plugin host, with support for many audio drivers and plugin formats.
It has some nice features like automation of parameters via MIDI CC (and send output back as MIDI too) and full OSC control.

This is a small but significant update that builds up on top of what was released in 2.0.
Please see the 2.1-RC1 announcement for details on what is is new in 2.1.

Unlike last time, there are no official plans for version 2.2 just yet, my focus will now be going into the DPF and JACK projects instead.
The master branch of Carla's code repository is now for 2.1, while the previous 2.0 master got renamed "hotfix-2.0.0".
No new features will be added to 2.1 series, only bugfixes.

Changes since 2.1-RC2

• Add a simple cv2audio plugin
• Brown color for CV ports, to make them more easily recognizable
• Fix crash loading LV2 plugin with CV and latency ports
• Fix mingw/gcc-9 build

Changes between 2.1-RC2 and 2.1-RC1

• Fix crash on stack unwind for a few operations
• Fix duplicate data (name, label, uid) used in VST synth/fx Shell plugin
• Fix JACK metadata usage for multiple carla instances and plugin renames
• Fix MIDI CC assignment showing wrong selected value (base 16 vs 10)
• Fixup carla-control (was broken in RC1)
• Optimize and reduce memory usage of UI bridges
• Overall fix of postponed RT events
• Give focus to bridged UIs when first shown
• Ignore any LV2 patch:writable that is not an lv2:Parameter
• Rename experimental "prevent bad things" option and give it a tool-tip
• Support the new LV2 UI requestParameterValue API
• Support the new LV2 UI background/foreground color API
• Many other miscellaneous bug fixes, see the git log for details

Downloads

To download Carla binaries or source code, jump on over to the KXStudio downloads section.
Carla v2.1 is available pre-packaged in the KXStudio repositories, ArchLinux and Ubuntu since 20.04. On those you can simply install the carla package.
Bug reports and feature requests are welcome! Jump on over to the Carla's Github project page for those.

Patchage 1.0.2 has been released. Patchage is a modular patch bay for Jack and ALSA based audio/MIDI systems.

Changes:

• Add support for exporting canvas as PDF
• Bring back Jack buffer size selector
• Configure based on compiler target OS for cross-compilation
• Don't install 512x512 icons
• Fix compilation with Jack DBus
• Order ports deterministically
• Restore messages pane visibility and height
• Save window size and position when closed via window manager
• Style messages pane to match canvas
• Support Jack CV and OSC via metadata
• Upgrade to waf 2.0.19

Ganv 1.6.0 has been released. Ganv is an interactive Gtk canvas widget for graph-based interfaces (patchers, modular synthesizers, finite state automata, interactive graphs, etc). For more information, see http://drobilla.net/software/ganv.

Changes:

• Add API to specify module port order.
• Add support for PDF and PS export.
• Add support for beveled box corners.
• Add support for edges that do not constrain the layout.
• Dampen sprung layout energy over time to prevent oscillation.
• Distinguish edge color from port color slighly.
• Fix compilation with --no-fdgl (patch from Vlad Glagolev).
• Fix crash when destroying canvas.
• Fix port position on modules with embedded widgets.
• Fix positioning of embedded widgets when changing layout.
• Fix size of vertical flow modules.
• Fix unexpected node jumping when dragging new connections.
• Fix various minor visual alignment/sizing issues.
• Highlight connected edges on port hover.
• Improve appearance of graphs with circle nodes.
• Improve text rendering at high zoom.
• Improve update performance.
• Preserve selection for quickly making several connections.
• Upgrade to waf 2.0.19

• sfizz now builds down to gcc-4.9 with stricter C++11 compliance. The main release builds use C++17 mode on newer compilers (#111, #110)
• Upstream libraries updates (abseil, filesystem and atomic_queue) (#121)
• Added an experimental support for make uninstall (#118, #120)
• Add the autopan (#105), width, rectifier, gain, limiter (#131), and string resonator (#143) effects
• Curves are now registered within the synth but cannot be referenced yet (#96)
• Corrected a bug where the VST plugin got recreated needlessly in some hosts (#122)
• Added a “panic button” API that kills voices (#122)
• Corrected a potential overflow for CC names (930bfd)
• Added support for more generators using wavetables (#61)
• Added support for the oscillator opcode, to create generators from files (#128)
• Generators using wavetables are now correctly tuned (#126)
• The stereo panning stage of the process was corrected; width is now set to 100% by default as it should, and panning is properly applied (1faa7f, b55171, #133)
• The logging API can be used to set a log filename (a6cbb4)
• Corrected errors in the performance report script related to display values (file names and histogram range)
• Reworked the parser; the new one is more efficient, and can indicate error/warning ranges (#130)
• The VST plugin now reloads the file automatically, like the LV2 plugin (#139)
• The max number of CCs was increased to 512, to accomodate some libraries that use cc300 modifiers.
• The engine uses floating point values internally for midi events (#137); this prepares it for high-resolution midi down the line.
• Fixes some realtime synchronization issues in the VST (#140)
• Added support for note_polyphony, polyphony, and note_selfmask (#142)
• Added support for pitch_cc and tune_cc modifiers (#142)
• The modifier support was overhauled; all regions can now have multiple CCs modifying the same target (#142).
• Corrected bugs and differences with Cakewalk/ARIA in the ADSR envelope (#136, #129)
• Improved performance of the amplitude stage gain of the rendering process (#145)
• The VST3 are now a submodule; more architecture targets have been added (#158, #147, patch proposed by hexdump0815)

A new tutorial about subtractive synthesizers was shared by DSmolken’s sample instruments experience applied in the Caveman Cosmonaut sample library.
Some fixes and additions were made in our opcode database and in software as well, like the Windows OpenMPT music tracker by sagamusix.
New contributions was provided by other users like jisaacstone, and a big contribution from jpcima for the effects section.
Now we have also a new page for convenience that lists all opcodes present in our database.