How To Do Spectral Morphing

[housemusiclover]

moar! gimme happy ending Kruddler.

[Syncretia]

Sorry dude, I've got nothing to report at the moment.

I had a bit of a look at Alchemy again because people were telling me that you could do morphing between two sources. I could be wrong but I think that's complete bollocks. When I tried using the Morph function inside Alchemy, it sounded like it was just cross-fading the two sound sources. It only gives you a cross-fade control so even if it actually is doing spectral morphing, you have no control over how the waves are morphed.

I've been on hiatus pursuing other things related to music production.

Basically, back to the drawing board. But, to some up here are some points:

-Kontakt does something like spectral morphing using the AET function. However, I don't believe it's the same kind of spectral morphing that Amon Tobin uses. I strongly believe that real spectral morphing would require a tool like SPEAR which would take all the strands of a sound out separately, but then have a different tool two merge the two sets of strands back together. I still don't know of any tools that do this aside from Kyma which is damned expensive.

-I have written a Max patch that will allow you to play samples like a keyboard. It's polyphonic and I can get some great sounds out of it. It's still got some glitches though so I won't be releasing it until I've ironed those out. Should be soon.

-If you check out Michael Norris's stuff, there are some FX that sound like Amon Tobin's stuff. http://www.michaelnorris.info/software/ ... ctral.html. They are great FX whichever way you look at it.

So still looking for a tool that can do proper spectral morphing. I will be again investigating some further leads from this thread soon. If someone else would like to follow them up, it would help me a lot.

[Syncretia]

I should finally add that the hole "Spectral Morphing" thing was probably a bit misleading. I'm sure that it's part of what makes ISAM what it is, but I no longer believe that it's the defining characteristic. Amon obviously used many modern synthesis techniques like granular synthesis, physical modelling, spectral effects and so on with lots of field and studio sampling. The Haken Continuum (the keyboard in the vids) is also an important factor in Amon's sound. Not one of these things is the defining feature of ISAM.

Although, I'm more convinced than ever that the driver behind all the techniques used on ISAM is the Kyma system. But, I could be wrong.

[siliconarc]

If you're still interested in these sounds, give izotope iris a try.

[Syncretia]

I have an answer to the Spectral Morphing thing. I have now have Kyma, and I've been writing a journal of my experience so far. You should have a read from the beginning but Part 3 has a section on morphing which is probably the specific answer to my original question:

http://syncretia.net/wordpress/

PS: Iris looks great! Wish I'd known about this before. Also Image Line's Harmor looks excellent as well.

[agent314]

This has been a really interesting thing to spectate on from the sidelines, Kruddler. Definitely post in here when you have new blog posts up - I am eager to hear how you end up enjoying the Kyma after you get the hang of it/get a usable workflow set up.

[Syncretia]

I've got 5 posts up now. I think will have another one up in the next day or 2.

I'm getting some stuff done in Kyma now. Can't say that it's really musical, or really much fun for that matter.

Today, I hooked the Paca up to my network via ethernet cable. That allowed me to create a TouchOSC interface and control some parameters in Kyma with the use of my iPhone. That was pretty cool. I was considering forking out $300 for a Wacom tablet, but I can actually control 4 morphing parameters in Kyma using 2 X/Y pads in TouchOSC. Will do a bit of a write up about this.