Spectral tools are all the rage. Ever fancied trying to play with those techniques under the hood? Umut Eldem aka Hearing Glass has a great set of video tutorials. They’re implemented perfectly in Max, but they’re even worth following along from other environments.
I got hooked on this with the spectral filters tutorial from a couple of weeks ago; it’s eloquently explained, so even if you give up on the patching part, watching this will help you understand how a lot of other plug-ins and Max for Live plugdata creations actually work. And that in turn will likely help you better understand what parameters do what. Space-y!
There are other great spectral-based tutorials here, too:
Spectral distortion!
And there’s Spectral Synthesis:
The nice thing about these is, you use Jitter for the spectra and you also have a visual. I built a synth and played live with it, using Pure Data and Processing at the time. (Huh, I should really rebuild that in a more useful Max for Live device or plug-in or something!)
Good times. Hope he keeps these up.
Hungry for more?
The basis of this is pfft~, a terrific Max external. (It’s also an interjection, used in slang, and… wait, really? A movie — Phffft — with Judy Holliday, Jack Lemmon, Jack Carson, and Kim Novak?! There’s also a song.)
Some other useful Max reading on the topic:
Indexing and accessing the bins of an FFT – Max cookbook
The “p” in pfft~ stands for “patcher”; it’s a convenience object for handling the fft~ object, which exists in Pure Data, too, and uses essentially the same API. That means you can follow along with this tutorial using Pd. (I think, anyway… I’ll do that! It usually reinforces the learning for me.)
Using Max, of course, you can take advantage of the Max for Live guide I wrote. It’d be a natural to add this patch to the effect or synth template:
Parallel universe
Elsewhere, the “p” means parallel FFT. There is an open library called pfft that you might use if you’re outside the world of Max.
PFFT – Massively Parallel FFT based on FFTW3
It’s advanced but extensively documented, and there’s a Python binding available.
Parallel FFTs aren’t just for sound, either. Here’s that same library solving particle meshes.
If your brain is fried after the Max tutorials or digging into that, here, watch this song. It is not about “patcher” or “parallel FFTs.” But I guess this is the canonical way to spell “pfft!” (There is a deep library of alternate verses to this one, which you could think of like an FFT bin of silliness.)
Okay, since that is entirely useless, here’s Umut’s site, instead!