Shape of Sound

Sketch Synth FX 1.0.2 has just been released, it adds 4 new sound banks each with their own FX layouts. In the past every FX layout was the same, you moved from left to right through pitch, low pass filter, high pass filter, distortion, chorus, delay and then importantly to a volume / bypass pad.

In the new FX layouts the pitch and bypass pads are always there but there are now new effects like more detailed delay, reverb, bit crusher, hard limiter &  compression. Each new pad is now just themed visually with new sounds, but also has new FX layouts as well. For instance once of my favourites is the new Explosives pad, it has 18 different explosive sounds that you can adjust 4 different delay parameters, 4 different reverb parameters and a low pass filter with LFO on in order to turn a single explosive sound into a whole bombing party.

Another of the new pads is called warmer, the previous pads in Sketch Synth FX varied between dark, light and urban, this time it was important to have something a bit warmer and so it contains 18 much warmer samples, and it’s FX allow you to work in detail with the chorus, reverb and compression settings to warm up your sound.

If soft vintage sounds aren’t your thing then there is always Jagged Edge, this pad contains heavy bass and murky sounds that benefit from a tight set of distortion effects. On the menu is compression, followed by hard limiting, followed by a bit crusher then a gated distortion effect, last a little reverb is applied to give a metallic finish. This one is definitely aimed less at fuzzy overdrive and more at metallic sheen, I wanted raspy effects not over the top fuzz.

Lastly there is the toughest of the lot of them to get to grips with, the noise pad, but ultimately the most satisfying. You have 18 different noise types and then a diverse set of effects. Starting with a high pass filter, then gated distortion, reverb, a screaming chorus feedback system and lastly  wobble it is possible to create some really quite bizarre sounds with this one from foot steps, to screams, to running water, to explosions… someday I should offer a prize for the most innovative sound to come out of this. Much more taxing than the others but more interesting long term.

All in all this is a major update for Sketch Synth FX, I’m very thankful to all of you who rated it so far, it’s been great seeing some 5* reviews for it:

Fun ★★★★★

by Obis11 – Version 1.0.1 – Dec 14, 2012

My favorite from Shape of Sound. Can’t wait to use the updates projected for sometime. Great job.

I hope you enjoy this update. I’m sorry that I didn’t manage to get audio bus in there, there are difficulties. I use a framework called Unity3D for making these apps and it does not allow itself to be played in the background, it seems to work for a while and then crashes after 30s or so. If anyone has managed to run Unity3D in the background on the iPad then please let me know because there are lots of audio users who want this feature.

The artwork for Sketch Synth 2 v1.2.0 has just arrived and it’s looking hot. Jack East was the artist on this one.

I got the blackberry Z10 as a test device recently for development, I was quite sceptical of it on the basis of having seen some pretty dreadful Blackberry touch devices over the years. This time though I think they’ve got it right. The latest software performs well on the device, everything slides and swipes about nicely, no glitches. The UI takes about a day to fully get used to and then it is pretty intuitive and makes for pretty glitch free performance. Shock feature was the Camera though, we compared this to an iPhone 4S and it just kicks it out the door. The Camera has an excellent auto focus and a range of post-effects that make it very easy to bring out extra life in your snaps. The auto focus is the bit though that grabs me, I managed to take some cool pictures from a moving vehicle with virtually no blur. Anyway here is a snap of some flowers from the Z10:

I really haven’t done that much to them, I used the sixties frame effect and altered the contrast and sharpness a little to get the focussed centre and blurred edges look. Very very impressed with that Camera.

I think people are talking about the apps a bit at the moment  and there didn’t seem to be much of interest on the app world; but my bet is that will change. I have noticed that Blackberry are investing a little time in at least two major platforms:

   * Phonegap

   * Unity3D

Both platforms allow for cross-platform development of apps and Unity3D boasts that some 50% of mobile gaming apps are published using it. Even Rovio are using Unity for their Angry Birds stuff. Phonegap is just a platform to make HTML5 apps a bit easier to publish, but still some cool stuff can be made with it. So definitely Blackberry will catch up on the apps, the phone is certainly fast enough for it.

I didn’t try out any 3D graphics so can’t tell you about that. I’ll be sad to give this device up once the testing period is over.

Just reeling in the figures for a prMac press campaign, actually very good. I thought I would show you some sales figures from an actual release to give you an idea of why it might be important. On April 8th below a new product was released and got it’s usual bit of attention on the Mac app store, on April 12th I sent a press release to prMac and by April 14th I got a large spike in sales more than making up for the time put in writing the press release and the $30 or so spent on it. there was an extra add-on that I purchased where I got detailed feedback on my press release which was pretty good. The key thing picked up was that the way I was writing it was as a sales document rather than a press release to try to gather ongoing interest. I think that point is reflected in my figures, that there was a spike in sales shortly after the release and not much more; next time I will be writing it for journalists instead.

If you want to use prMac then they you can go through the link below and I get some kind of referral goodies, they have a scheme where if your refer 15 people you get a free press release which isn’t too shabby either.

This is the first article in the going deeper into the sound series, I’ll be looking at all sorts of ways to analyse music and analysis various genres of music looking for connections in structure and the conveyed music and geometry of the piece. This article will start introducing you to the tools and show you how structure can be analysed visually. In this analysis you will see it is easier to make these conclusions by listening; but as we go on we will look at picking up subtler modulations and patterns where it would be very difficult to communicate these or pick them up by ear. So without further ado I want to take you through a deeper analysis of the sounds from one of my favorite producers of the last few decades: DJ Sasha

Sasha has produced some of the deepest and most spiritually moving sounds in dance music, mastering a dream like quality in his Involver series and I’m going to start digging deeper into his sound using some of todays easily accessible audio toolchains.

The track I will be analyzing is Chained from the Involv3r album just because it is my favourite track on the album at the moment, you can get the album here

I will be using 3 main tools: Audacity, Mixed In Key and Traktor. Audacity is a free tool that really lets you dig down into the waveform and get a quick spectral analysis on fragments of a track, you can get a copy here, it’s user interface isn’t that quick to come to grips with; but once you know the keyboard shortcuts then it can be quite fast to dive into stuff. Mixed In Key is a tool that allows you to look at the key of the track (available here) and Traktor is a DJing tool with good display of transient components in a track that allows analysis of the beat of the music (available here).

So lets start looking at the structure of the track, I’ll use Mixed In Key for this although any of the tools would be effective:

The Mixed in Key waveform shows several distinct chunks, when we listen to the track we can match these with up to areas of the tracks where the drums and bass sounds come in more heavily. I want to concentrate on the intro right now which is the first pink area labelled with the Am key in the track above, the Am label indicates the key of the track is likely to be A minor. Intro:

The intro lasts 1 minute 33 seconds with a constant beat before the bass and vocals whip in, so in those 93 seconds what does Sasha do to entertain us, well, we can see some dips or breaks in the into waveform above, there is a light one after the play button and a really distinct one at the end of the intro, so we have at least 2 breaks the last more pronounced and longer than the first, the drop where the bass and percussion comes back in is also longer each time. Overall then you can’t say the music is getting more or less consistent as the intro continues, the drops are more pronounced but further apart.

Next lets take a look at the breaks themselves, when we listen to the track we can hear the bass fade out on that first break at 40 seconds in. If we use audacity to get the frequency spectrum before the break:

 And compare that to the frequency spectrum during the break:

You can see that in the lower graph the first 200Hz of frequencies have levels in the range of -12dB to -18dB compared to -9dB to -16dB in the earlier graph. That range of frequencies is the range where the sub bass and kick drums live. We also see a hump in the mid band frequencies at around 400Hz during the break, implying that there are more instrumental and key like parts going on during the break. As soon as the break ends then the bass and kick drums drop back in and the music rises with additional vocal fragments thrown in to give you a sense that the vocals will be coming soon.

The second break follows the same pattern as the first, we need no tools to analyze what is going on here, the kick drums and bass give way to an almost xylophone like percussion before a swooshing noise sample builds us up for the drop where the vocals come back in and we can relax into the song, listen to the words without fear of missing anything in the lush sounds below.

The last thing to look at in the this intro in Traktor:

Traktor has the bpm down as 124 bpm and as the break begins the interesting bit is that we can see a gradual fade over about 10 seconds where the base and kicks fade out into the break. On the other side at the end of the break we see the drums and kicks come back in one swoop:

It may all seem right now like we’ve gone into an awful lot of technical detail to understand what we can listen to, but there is a point to it which is that it demonstrates the concepts in a visual way to people where you are not under pressure to come to a conclusion on the spot which is the case if you do this with just the audio.

What we have learnt so far is that in this track Sasha uses progressively longer and more pronounced breaks and drops to build the mood. Early on the breaks are subtler and kicks and bass are faded out over 5-10s whereas further into the track the breaks are more immediately faded out, once into full flow all the dynamics are more pronounced. Percussive key like elements are used during the breaks and short noises and vocal fragments are used to build anticipation.

The next step is to have some means to display this on a track, we are going to look at several different ways of communicating structure, motion and geometry of music through several different artists and communicating this visually is going to allow the best way to communicate a common understanding of geometry and motion within a piece of music. Sure we can make assertions about music aurally more easily but then the accuracy with which it can be conveyed to another person is minimal and generally results in arguments that boil down to linguistic differences rather than anything interesting, at least with a visual representation the communication is clear and that creates a sound basis for learning about the geometry of music. We examined the breaks and drops earlier and saw that to start with the breaks were becoming longer and how accentuated they were was also becoming greater. Through the visual and audio inspection techniques I’ve drawn over the waveform below with a blue line that increases as the track becomes more consistent in terms of the length of breaks and drops, and a green line is draw showing the strength or difference between the breaks and drops. These are done by inspection and so it is quite valid to dispute that; however it is quite clear from the graphs below that the piece has a structural geometry which is interpreted by me to be a triangle / saw tooth like waveform.

In the next parts of the series we will look at other tracks, other measures and start to draw comparisons, develop measurement techniques to help us see these patterns visually and then start upon recreating some of these geometries.

If you want to experience the sounds of Sasha yourself, or use any of the tools then you can follow the links here:

You can get Audacity here

Mixed In Key is available here

And Traktor is available here

It’s confirmed and ready for sale; months after the last update the 2.0.0 release is here, Sketch Synth 3D is now officially the bundle package for the Sketch Synth products. You can find it here.

Finally Sketch Synth 3D 2.0.0 has been submitted to the app store for review. I’ve added in Sketch Synth 2 and it all works well together, you can see a screenshot of the main menu attached to this post. I encountered a bug while programming whereby if you load up a scene in Sketch Synth 2 then all the samples are then visible in Sketch Synth 3D; and I was going to fix it but then I found that I really liked it and it means that there are around 50 extra loops for Sketch Synth 3D in there. The coolest part though is being able to share a common clipboard between the programs and all the drawing / sequencing / mayhem that comes therein.

Finally Sketch Synth 2 is released, it builds on Sketch Synth 3D by providing a much simplified pad based rompler experience. Everything is a loop and you crossfade between different drums and presets and then use Audio Copy & Paste to get things in and out, find it here:

https://itunes.apple.com/app/sketch-synth-2/id624265170?ls=1&mt=8