Archive

November's blog post just went up. It's a short one about audio effects using the cepstrum:

I spent a lot of this month on a more ambitious idea, also involving unusual frequency transforms, but kept hitting wall after wall with it. It just didn't sound good. The idea to move over to the cepstral domain occurred to me eventually, and finding an invertible way to work with MFCCs not long after.

The idea presented in the blog post is ultimately a pretty straightforward extension of the concept of MFCCs, by retaining phases and a "residual spectrum." I wouldn't be surprised if this concept has been found by someone else, but the aim here is not to present novel research that would pass peer review, but rather get some neat sounds. The post definitely has those, in my humble opinion.

I'm playing live in the Mission in San Francisco, CA on the 28th, my first live show since I was a teenage noise bro. The best way to keep updated is to follow AV Club on Instagram (link has strobing).

And yes, I guess this has become an artist event newsletter, but I'll continue to bundle these with blog post announcements to avoid cluttering your inbox.

Speaking of blog posts, I intend to concentrate on DSP for the year's three remaining entries. Lately, I've been interested in synthesizing instruments that are neither real nor realistic, but rather capture some of the depth and complexity of acoustic instruments in ways that aren't always obvious when working with synthesis. I've compiled some of my notes on that into this month's blog post:

Massive thanks to all who listened to Haywire Frontier. I gave a talk on rhythmic structures in the album yesterday for the NOTAM SuperCollider users group, and this month's post adapts and expands the contents of the talk:

Although peppered with SuperCollider code and references to the album, it should be readable for both non-SC users and non-album-listeners. For those in the latter category:

Nathan HoHaywire Frontier

(Sorry for sending two emails so close to each other. This isn't a typical volume for the newsletter, I promise.)

My first solo full-length album will be out on the Japanese label tokinogake on September 9th. It's available for preorder now, and you can listen to the first track, "Trickster Deity:"

Nathan HoHaywire Frontier

I've been working on this album since February and it's likely the biggest event in my creative life so far. The album was sequenced and synthesized entirely in SuperCollider with no samples, external hardware, or third-party plugins. It became a dissertation on DSP and sound design, with many concepts developed on the blog ending up as elements on the project.

It's finally out: the most ambitious and longest post in the history of the blog, at 8,000 words and over a dozen images. It is my introduction to wavelets, geared toward an audience of audio specialists:

Good Lord, this turned into a nightmare. I have been working on this one since March, and decided to push to complete it for this month. I unfortunately did not succeed in meeting my own monthly artificial deadline, as I suddenly got very busy. I have nevertheless decided to put it up in its current state, as most of the essential writing concerning the CWT and FWT is final and ready for your perusal. The TODOs peppered everywhere are either cosmetic or in the more detailed sections. I hope to completely finish this article in the coming weeks.

I'm certainly going to scale back the ambitiousness of the blog posts for the next few months to recover from this one. I promise the choice of topics will live up to my usual nerdy standards, but for my sanity the word counts will have to be kept to a dull roar.

Not one but two blog posts. Correlated Granular Synthesis is my attempt to combine classic granular with multivariate probability distributions:

The above came out in early June, so soon after the previous blog post (A Preliminary Theory of Sound Design) that I decided to hold off on a newsletter email until I had another blog post out. This next one is more abstract, introducing a simple sound synthesis technique I call The Duration Trick:

As an offshoot of the music I’ve been working on, here is my attempt to explain my philosophy of sound design, at a level of abstraction that makes sense to me:

There have been a few uploads to my channel as well:

Today’s blog post is a lab notebook entry about audio texture resynthesis using machine listening features, some basic statistics, and differentiable computing:

It has sound examples if you scroll down. There are plenty of ways to improve it, but it doesn’t sound too bad for a single day of work.

Project code here:

My output as a “New Media Art-Tech Content Creator” [VOMITING NOISES] might be a bit slow for the next month, as I’m in the weeds of the most ambitious musical project I’ve ever made in SC.

Today I took a little break from that to respond to a YouTube comment asking about the best resources for learning SuperCollider. My answer turned into an entire blog post:

My modest goal this year is to release at least one substantial blog post per month. Three for three so far!

I generally shy away from negative topics on my blog, but I couldn't help it. Today's post explores the math of a rarely-discussed and deliciously bizarre flavor of dynamic range compression:

I was too lazy to make you any audio samples or nice graphs of the curves, but there is a SuperCollider patch that you are free to steal.

I hadn't recorded a proper session in a while, so here's a video where I started a Richard Devine-style track in SuperCollider:

The next blog post nears completion. In the meantime, I have an announcement.

The most common questions I get on my YouTube are “why don’t you use Patterns” and “can I see the source code?” I haven’t yet written an epic viral clapback on SuperCollider’s Patterns system, but I have started a Patreon where I will be uploading source code for many (not all) of my patches, from videos and from practice sessions.

Nathan Ho | music tech | Patreon

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After a past plagiarism incident I’ve been a little hesitant to distribute SuperCollider code publicly. As a result the tier that gives access to .scd files is priced somewhat high. If you can’t afford it then that’s okay, the lower tier will give you early access to videos and unreleased tunes.

Today’s big news is an EP release. I actually made this EP exactly 3 years ago,

Interstate HydraNocturnes

Happy 2023. My latest blog post is about a way to synthesize weird sounds with Lindenmayer systems:

The results sound only alright in my book, but I think with a more advanced granular synthesis engine this research could form the basis for something really cool and expressive.

I also made a lot of music in SuperCollider over the holidays, including this Richard Devine-inspired beat from yesterday:

The first ever post on my blog that isn't about audio or music has gone up. It concerns my new obsessive hobby for the past two months, 3D renders of mathematical art. Specifically, it's a review of an old research 3D modeling program called TopMod, a discussion of how to emulate its features in Blender, and an announcement of a new experimental Blender addon for constructing curved handles:

I've put up a page to collect some renders and animations of mathematical objects I've been making:

This is a post I've been meaning to write for a long time, since I've been kicking around the concept for a few years. It's a workflow for producing ambient sound collages entirely in Audacity or any similar program:

https://nathan.ho.name/posts/sound-dumplings/

I scrawled this blog post quickly to take a short break from a big project I'm working on. It's an indirect successor to Venn 7 but has nothing to do with audio or SuperCollider. Here's a teaser:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blpCZNOIbMc

Today I was working on some new music and in the process realized a possibly novel way to approach feedback synthesis. The blog post wrote itself, and contains a SuperCollider patch for you to pillage. It sounds pretty noisy, but I like it. Plus, a certain vintage analog synthesizer and a mathematical model for group improvisation:

Also made a little macrotonal SuperCollider patch I kinda like:

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Tonight’s blog post is another modest project with a short writeup. In it, I review a slightly obscure 20-year-old synthesis method developed mostly by electronic music pioneer Curtis Roads:

https://nathan.ho.name/posts/pulsar-synthesis/

The second half of the post is the more interesting one, demonstrating how I code pulsar synthesis in SuperCollider and providing two audio samples of the technique in a serious (if abstract) musical context. It ties into previous blog posts on “switching” and “moisture bass.”

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It’s been a little while since my last post. I have multiple blog post projects in progress (too many) and they’ve all suffered from various setbacks, mostly scope creep. Nevertheless, they’re all fun and I’m looking forward to their release.

In the meantime, I have a bite-sized post that I dashed off today about the effectiveness of “switching” in algorithmic music and other media as well:

Lately I've been feeling more inspired than usual on the writing front, so expect more posts in the coming month. Tonight's post is short, and it's about a simple application of ring modulation that a friend showed me a few years ago:

Additionally, I have a new single out called "Paradise": https://nathanho.bandcamp.com/track/paradise

Singing done in OddVoices, synths in SuperCollider, arrangement and mixing in REAPER.

I've stumbled upon what I call "Feedback Integrator Networks," and I'm quite excited about the sounds it's been generating for me. I'd describe them as harsh, but richly textured and dynamic.

The inspiration was Giorgio Sancristoforo's recent synthesizer Bentō, itself inspired by the Japanese noise scene. https://www.giorgiosancristoforo.net/ Bentō is a standalone software noise synth with two unusual oscillators that go through filters and envelopes, and everything feeds back into everything.

Feedback Integrator Networks appropriate Feedback Delay Networks, a structure often used in reverb design, by shrinking the delays to a single sample and adding clippers and filters. The blog post I've written has a block diagram, sound samples, and some SuperCollider code. Have fun.

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For those who haven't heard from me in a while, my current project has been building a free and open source singing synthesizer called OddVoices. It has an online interface that you can use at this link: https://oddvoices.org/ All you need is a MIDI file and some lyrics, and the synth will sing it for you (or try to).

I've been using the blog as a dev log for OddVoices lately, and the newest post is up. It's a technical dive into pitch tracking algorithms and vocal pitch phenomena: