[audioplayer file=”http://www.ahsquared.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/pd_ks_seq7.mp3″ titles=”Karplus-Strong Experiment 1″ artists=”Andre Hayter”]This is just a short sample of a very basic (and mostly uninteresting to listen to) sequence. What IS interesting about it is the way it was created. I used Pure Data to generate the sound and create the sequence. There are no samples used here, and no “soft-synths” although strictly speaking I created a simple “soft-synth” here. There is only one sound source here, a sine wave oscillator being fed back into a 2nd order lowpass filter and a delay line. This is in fact the Karplus-Strong method of physically modeling a string. I have left the burst of sine wave very short here so the attack is a bit stronger than it would be with a normal string I think. But it’s quite remarkable how nice it sounds, with so little going into it. There are no additional effects. This is the dry sound coming out of Pure Data. I have attached the patch for anyone who is interested.
The sequencer I copied from the excellent tutorial/manual site: Floss Manuals. I got turned on to the K-S method by Alex McLean who runs a fascinating blog at yaxu.org, and who implemented it using HaXe, Javascript and Flash. “Babble” is a really fun sound/pattern generator based on sound poetry and vocable words. You should really check it out!
There are a few other things going on in the patch as well. You can select white noise instead of a sine wave which is actually the original way of doing things.
And finally, I just want to note that this is the first installment in my effort to create a new sound every day or as near as I can. With the additional goal of creating something out of those sounds every week and then every month making something usable and listenable. This is an idea i got from http://audiocookbook.org which is another great site.