Archive for February, 2009
Grouper
Hey internet – how’s it going? Sorry I haven’t been around much of late – I’ve been working my little heart out for PIFF, and what an IFF it was. But, lucky you, all that’s behind me now, so we should be spending a lot more time together in the coming weeks. In fact, as a token of my sincere regret regarding this neglegence, here’s a little something I made for you;
Patch available here;
You’ll need Max/MSP 5 ($$$) or Max Runtime (free), from Cycling ‘74.
It’s a demonstration of Diana Deutsch’s scale illusion, wherein your brain essentially chooses pitch based grouping cues over location based ones. It works best (or is most impressive?) with headphones on, although it’s also pretty cool on speakers that are modestly spaced. There’s a built in tone generator to play with, or you can kill the audio and route the midi to the DAW of your choice and feed it to a couple hard panned synths. The score on the bottom reflects what’s actually being piped to each channel. Also, try muting and unmuting channels, to get a sense of what’s going on, and I *may* have messed up some of the modal intervals… so no promises.
I plan on making a few more of these simple patches that demonstrate perceptual oddities. Beyond being (I think) really interesting, they’re also sparking a lot of creative thought, and leading me in some pretty interesting compositional directions. Also, let it not be said I failed to post in the month of February.