Sampler Concrete

Photo by Carbon Arc. Licensed under Creative Commons.

First, I want to welcome aboard Jean-Luc Sinclair. As part of his NYU Software Synthesis class, he has graciously decided to share the articles he is writing for his students. His first contribution Organizing Sounds: Musique Concrete, Part I has already proven to be the most popular post here at CodeHop. Last year, before The Csound Blog became CodeHop, Jean-Luc had written another amazing piece, Organizing Sounds: Sonata Form, which I highly recommend. Thank you, Jean-Luc!

Now on to today’s example. (Get sampler_concrete.csd)

Many tape techniques are simplistic in nature and are easily mimic-able in the digital domain. After all, a sampler can be thought of as a high-tech featured-endowed tape machine. A more apt comparison would be that of a waveform editor such as Peak, WaveLab or Audacity.

I’ve designed a Csound instrument called “splice” that is about as basic as it gets when it comes to samplers. My hope is that the simplicity of the instrument will bring attention to the fact that many of the tape concrete techniques mentioned in Jean-Luc’s article are themselves simple.

Let’s take a look at the score interface to “splice”:

i "splice" start_time duration amplitude begin_splice end_splice

The start time and duration are both default parameters of a score instrument event. Three additional parameters are included for setting the amplitude, specifying the beginning time (in seconds) of the sample and specifying the end time (in seconds) of the sample to be played.

With this short list of instrument parameters, the following techniques are showcased in the Csound example: Splicing, Vari-speed, Reversal, “Tape” Loop, Layering, Delay and Comb Filtering.

Continuing Schaeffer’s tradition of using recordings of train, I’m using a found sound that I found on SoundCloud of the Manhattan subway. The recording is approximately 30 seconds in length. Most of the splicing in the examples take place between 17 and 26 seconds into the recording. Here are the results.

With this one simple instrument, it is entirely conceivable to compose a complete piece in the style of classic tape music.