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WeeklyBeats.com / Music / kevanatkins's music / FM Phase Étude

FM Phase Étude

By kevanatkins on March 6, 2016 5:41 pm

Nothing terribly exciting this week. I had just come back from a long bump-out shift that finished at the death knock. So I did a bit of SuperCollider live-coding before bed. Taking advantage of the precise frequency control in SC to generating polyrhythms using interference patterns in FM synthesis. All I did after the fact was top and tail in Pro Tools.

A slightly cleaned up version of the SC code can be found here.

Man these are some serious wubs! Some really interesting effects you achieved here.

Wow. I'll have to see if I can get something similar in Ableton using M4L Lfos.

Thanks!

Interesting and always changing, nice!

crazy

Jim Wood wrote:

Wow. I'll have to see if I can get something similar in Ableton using M4L Lfos.

Thanks!

You definitely can achieve this in M4L, but the effect is not achieved by LFOs, the whole all about the difference tones in the modulator sine waves. The formula in this case is:

Sin(f1 * (Sin(f2) + Sin(f3)))

Where the difference in frequency between f2 and f3 will determine the rate at which the signal modulates and the frequency of f1 determines the overall timbral intensity. A good starting point could f1 = 30, f2 = 96, f3 = 97. So from that, you'd get a modulation that cycles once a second as long as f2 and f3 at a 1 Hz difference. You'd be able to do this with cycle~ objects and some basic math. And then of course, you can widen out the difference between f2 and f3 and you get all sorts of other loopy effects that were not explored in this piece.

I was thinking about using the LFOs to control the frequencies of F2 and F3; not necessarily in a preplanned fashion. Happy accidents, basically.

Jim Wood wrote:

I was thinking about using the LFOs to control the frequencies of F2 and F3; not necessarily in a preplanned fashion. Happy accidents, basically.

That sounds cool. If you had a random LFO at a slow rate in Operator for just one of the two modulator frequencies, you qould more or less have a generative version of this piece. But the beating frequencies would be a lot less metric relative to each other.

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